This article was published on March 1, 2010

The Next Web’s Weekly Recap: Facebook Patents the Feed, Twitter Stats and Yahoo Deal


The Next Web’s Weekly Recap: Facebook Patents the Feed, Twitter Stats and Yahoo Deal

The Next Web's Weekly RecapWelcome to The Next Web’s Weekly Recap. Make sure to check out The Next Web’s Podcast (iTunes or XML) where we analyze, rant and have fun with the weekly tech news.

This week tech pundits had a field day predicting how Facebook’s mega patent of “the news feed” will effect the web and the social media sites we all use everyday. This week also saw Twitter reach a statistical milestone and close a major deal with Yahoo.

facebook-logoFacebook Patents “the feed”
The biggest news this week came out of left field when Facebook was granted a patent that they filed for back in 2006. The patent (covered in detail here), essentially claims ownership over what we take for granted on almost all social networks today – the news feed. What remains to be seen is just how Facebook plans to leverage this patent and enforce it. Many believe that we are set to see some ugly legal battles in the coming months surrounding this patent. Taking a backseat to this news but likely just as significant was Facebook’s announcement that they were expanding the Facebook Credit system in order to bring microtransaction features into more apps.

Picture 40Twitter Yahoo Deal & New Stats
This week saw a bunch of miscellaneous Twitter news. The biggest was the announcement of a deal between Twitter and Yahoo that will integrate Twitter into Yahoo’s various properties. The other major news was that Twitter’s long awaited advertising platform will likely launch within the coming month. The advertising news came on the heels of new Twitter statistics that revealed nearly 75,000,000 people visited Twitter worldwide in January and are tweeting at a rate of 600 tweets per second. This week also saw some big names join Twitter including the Dalai Lama and Conan O’Brien.

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