{
  "patent_number": "US 8171128",
  "country": "US",
  "title": "How Facebook's News Feed Picks Stories You'll Like",
  "original_title": "Communicating a newsfeed of media content based on a member's interactions in a social network environment",
  "summary": "Facebook's 2012 patent explains how it creates a personalized news feed by showing stories about friends' actions, ordered by your interest, and updating it based on what you click.",
  "what_it_does": "This patent describes a system for creating a personalized news feed on a social network, like Facebook. It starts by looking at who you're friends with and what they've been doing. Then, it generates 'news stories' about their actions. These stories are put into a news feed, and the system tries to guess how much you'll like each one, putting the ones it thinks you'll like most at the top. Crucially, it watches what you click on or interact with in the feed and uses that information to pick even more stories for you, and to decide the order they appear in. For example, if you click on a friend's photo album, the system might show you more stories about that friend or similar content.",
  "what_it_does_not_cover": [
    "News feeds that are not based on a user's connections within a social network",
    "News stories that do not describe an action taken by another user",
    "News feeds where the order of stories is not influenced by user affinity or interactions",
    "Systems that do not monitor user interactions to update the news feed",
    "News feeds that do not allow users to change the order of content"
  ],
  "filed": "2006-08-11",
  "granted": "2012-05-01",
  "expires": null,
  "status": "active",
  "holder": "Facebook Inc",
  "holder_url": "https://patentbrief.org/company/facebook-inc",
  "inventors": [
    {
      "name": "Andrew Bosworth",
      "url": "https://patentbrief.org/inventor/andrew-bosworth"
    },
    {
      "name": "Matt Cahill",
      "url": "https://patentbrief.org/inventor/matt-cahill"
    },
    {
      "name": "Mark Zuckerberg",
      "url": "https://patentbrief.org/inventor/mark-zuckerberg"
    },
    {
      "name": "Ruchi Sanghvi",
      "url": "https://patentbrief.org/inventor/ruchi-sanghvi"
    },
    {
      "name": "Chris Cox",
      "url": "https://patentbrief.org/inventor/chris-cox"
    }
  ],
  "times_cited": 134,
  "tags": [
    "social_media",
    "software",
    "consumer_electronics",
    "telecommunications"
  ],
  "abstract": "A system and method provides dynamically selected media content to someone using an electronic device in a social network environment. Items of media content are selected for the user based on his or her relationships with one or more other users. The user's relationships with other users are reflected in the selected media content and its format. An order is assigned to the items of media content, for example, based on their anticipated importance to the user, and the items of media content are displayed to the user in the assigned order. The user may change the order of the items of media content. The user's interactions with media content available in the social network environment are monitored, and those interactions are used to select additional items of media content for the user.",
  "url": "https://patentbrief.org/patent/us/8171128/facebook-social-graph",
  "markdown_url": "https://patentbrief.org/patent/us/8171128/facebook-social-graph/md",
  "google_patents_url": "https://patents.google.com/patent/US8171128",
  "relatedPatents": []
}