How Facebook's Share Button Works Across Different Websites

A patent describing how a social network can pull content from an outside website and share it with friends based on specific user-selected settings.

What it covers

This patent explains the mechanism behind the 'Share' button found on third-party websites. When a user clicks a sharing control outside of a social network, the social network server receives a request and serves an interface back to the user. This interface allows the user to define 'sharing parameters,' such as which specific parts of a webpage to include, how the content should look, and which friends or channels (like a wall or private message) should receive it. The system then retrieves the content from the external site and distributes it within the social network based on those user-defined settings.

What it doesn't cover

• —Does not cover sharing content that is already hosted directly on the social network's own servers.
• —Does not cover automated sharing that happens without an explicit interface for the user to select parameters.
• —Does not cover the underlying technology of the web browser or the external website itself.
• —Does not cover methods of sharing that do not involve a social networking system with established user connections.

The clever bit

The system dynamically tracks the original external content; if the source material on the external website is modified, the system can update the shared version within the social network to reflect those changes.

Why it matters

This patent describes the plumbing for the 'social web' that emerged in the late 2000s. By standardizing how external content is pulled into a social feed, it enabled the viral spread of articles, images, and videos across platforms like Facebook, effectively turning the entire internet into an extension of the social network's ecosystem.

Real-world examples

• 1.Facebook Share buttons on news articles
• 2.Embedded social media widgets on blogs
• 3.Cross-platform content syndication tools