Disclaimers: I haven't read the patent in question, I work for facebook, and therefor know some of the engineers whose patent we're discussing.. Most eye-rolli

Disclaimers: I haven't read the patent in question, I work for facebook, and therefor know some of the engineers whose patent we're discussing.. Most eye-rolling at patents never get past the title. This betrays a misunderstanding about what a patent is. Putting it in terms that are more readily accessible to engineers, a patent's title describes the problem to be solved; the USPTO, on the other hand, grants a patent to confer rights on that problem's solution. If I titled my patent "System and method for offline sorting", and armies of bloggers started scoffing, "Offline sorting! That's been around since the 1950's!", they would be missing the point. The relevant question is whether my offline sorting technology is sufficiently novel and non-obvious. Applying this to facebook, "System and method for a social news feed" or whatever is not the same thing as "having a patent on a news feed." The patent is on the combination of techniques and systems that facebook in particular contrived to deliver a newsfeed. It could still be the case that this is insufficiently innovative, but the discussion is not as simple as pulling up another example of a news feed and closing the case.