Facebook Patent Applications - Company Legal Profiles

MANAGING SOCIAL NETWORK ACCESSIBILITY BASED ON AGE

Granted: May 29, 2014
Application Number: 20140150068
When a user having an age less than a threshold age (a child user) attempts to access an online service or perform actions using the online service, the online service obtains parental authorization from an additional user having a parental relationship to the user. The child user may identify the user having the parental relationship and the online service verifies the validity of the identified user's account, the age of the identified user, and/or a connection between the identified…

DIRECT FILE TRANSFER BETWEEN SUBSCRIBERS OF A COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEM

Granted: May 22, 2014
Application Number: 20140143432
Systems and techniques for transferring a file from a first client associated with a first subscriber to a communications system to a second client associated with a second subscriber to the communications system by connecting from the first client to a communications system host; sending, through the communications system host, a request to the second client to establish a direct connection to the second client; when the second client accepts the request, establishing a direct…

DIRECT FILE TRANSFER BETWEEN SUBSCRIBERS OF A COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEM

Granted: May 22, 2014
Application Number: 20140143379
Systems and techniques for transferring a file from a first client associated with a first subscriber to a communications system to a second client associated with a second subscriber to the communications system by connecting from the first client to a communications system host; sending, through the communications system host, a request to the second client to establish a direct connection to the second client; when the second client accepts the request, establishing a direct…

ACTION CLUSTERING FOR NEWS FEEDS

Granted: May 22, 2014
Application Number: 20140143258
One embodiment selects from a plurality of actions performed by one or more users of a social networking system a first action and one or more second actions, wherein each action has one or more attributes; computes a score for each second action by comparing the one or more attributes of each second action with the one or more attributes of the first action; ranks the one or more second actions according to the score computed for each second action; and selects from the one or more…

INTELLIGENT IDENTIFICATION OF MULTIMEDIA CONTENT FOR GROUPING

Granted: May 22, 2014
Application Number: 20140143204
An intelligent synchronization tool ensures access to desired content in a manner that automatically keeps the content current on the portable media device. A variation threshold or user-specified degree of content variation may be introduced among content downloaded to a user's mobile device to prevent the user from becoming bored. Furthermore, intelligent synchronization may automatically populate the portable media device with popular content to save a user time and/or use passive…

INTELLIGENT IDENTIFICATION OF MULTIMEDIA CONTENT FOR SYNCHRONIZATION

Granted: May 22, 2014
Application Number: 20140143203
An intelligent synchronization tool ensures access to desired content in a manner that automatically keeps the content current on the portable media device. A variation threshold or user-specified degree of content variation may be introduced among content downloaded to a user's mobile device to prevent the user from becoming bored. Furthermore, intelligent synchronization may automatically populate the portable media device with popular content to save a user time and/or use passive…

Managing Targeting of Advertisements Based on User Associations with Social Networking Objects

Granted: May 22, 2014
Application Number: 20140143050
An entity provides a competitive block list for one or more of its objects in a social networking system. The competitive block list identifies advertisers or other entities prevented from targeting advertisements based on connections between users and objects of the entity. If a later received advertisement is targeted based on a connection between a user and an object of the entity, the social networking system determines whether the advertiser associated with the advertisement is…

SHARING ANNOTATIONS OF DIGITAL ITEMS

Granted: May 15, 2014
Application Number: 20140136983
A user may make a digital item available to other users of a computer network, such as an instant messaging system, a chat environment, or a subscription-based computer network. Examples of digital items that may be shared with other users include digital representations of graphic images, photographs, audio segments, songs, video segments, movies, and text (such as lists of favorites (e.g., a list of favorite books, a list of favorite movies, and a list of favorite places to visit)).…

DETERMINING A TRUST LEVEL OF A USER IN A SOCIAL NETWORK ENVIRONMENT

Granted: May 15, 2014
Application Number: 20140137201
A system and method for determining a trust level for a non-approved user in a social network is described. The method includes monitoring requests for social network interactions between an approved user and the non-approved user and determining if each interaction requested is of a first type or a second type. The method further includes increasing a first trust value when the interaction requested is of the first type and increasing a second trust value when the interaction requested…

PRESENTING QUESTION AND ANSWER DATA IN A SOCIAL NETWORKING SYSTEM

Granted: May 15, 2014
Application Number: 20140137001
A social networking system includes a question and answer system that displays to a viewing user questions and answers provides by other users of the social networking system. The question and answer system may display answers to a particular question in a way that visually indicates both the global answer set and a subset of the global answer set, such as the viewing user's friends. The social networking system may also display to a viewing user news stories about another user asking or…

TIMING FOR PROVIDING RELEVANT NOTIFICATIONS FOR A USER BASED ON USER INTERACTION WITH NOTIFICATIONS

Granted: May 15, 2014
Application Number: 20140136639
A social networking system provides relevant third-party content objects to users by matching user location, interests, and other social information with the content, location, and timing associated with the content objects. Content objects are provided based on relevance scores specific to a user. Relevance scores may be calculated based on the user's previous interactions with content object notifications, or based on interests that are common between the user and his or her…

Displaying News Ticker Content in a Social Networking System

Granted: May 15, 2014
Application Number: 20140136625
A social networking system displays raw stories about a user's friends' actions in a news ticker as those actions occur. The social networking system is monitored for actions associated with users connected with the target user. The social networking system may be continually monitored such that actions are identified in real-time as they are performed. The news ticker is updated such that stories including the identified actions and the associated connected users are displayed within a…

PROVIDING SOCIAL CONTEXT FOR PRODUCTS IN ADVERTISEMENTS

Granted: May 15, 2014
Application Number: 20140136332
A social networking system provides a social plug-in that enables advertisers to utilize relevant social context information available for advertising purposes. An advertiser adds the social plug-in next to an ad, where the plug-in is provided with a list of items that are relevant to the ad. The social plug-in communicates with the social networking system to retrieve social context information to provide to a particular viewing user based on the list of items relevant to the ad. The…

ESTABLISHING COMMUNICATION

Granted: May 15, 2014
Application Number: 20140133530
In particular embodiments, a broadband receiver of a wireless communications device may poll a broadband communications channel for configuration data. Once the configuration data has been received, the channel may be established, and connection information may be transmitted to a base station. The connection information may be an identifier for a user of a social-networking system. Based on the identifier, the device may be able to establish a narrowband communications channel with the…

CACHE REPLACEMENT POLICY FOR DATA WITH STRONG TEMPORAL LOCALITY

Granted: May 8, 2014
Application Number: 20140129779
Various cache replacement policies are described whose goals are to identify items for eviction from the cache that are not accessed often and to identify items stored in the cache that are regularly accessed that should be maintained longer in the cache. In particular, the cache replacement policies are useful for workloads that have a strong temporal locality, that is, items that are accessed very frequently for a period of time and then quickly decay in terms of further accesses. In…

System and Method for Managing Information Flow Between Members of an Online Social Network

Granted: May 8, 2014
Application Number: 20140129548
An online social network is provided in which members of the online social network control who may view their personal information and who may communicate with them. The members control who may view their personal information by setting a visibility preference. A member may not view another member's full personal profile if the measure of relatedness between the two is greater than the visibility preference of the other member. The members also control who may communicate with them by…

Combination of Social Networking Data with Other Data Sets for Estimation of Viewership Statistics

Granted: May 8, 2014
Application Number: 20140129321
Embodiments of the invention combine information from different data sets, such as social networks, advertising networks, and/or panels, each data set comprising statistics about past viewership of content (e.g., advertisements). The result of the combination is a model that, when applied to statistics about viewing of particular content, produces viewing statistics about the particular content that are more accurate than the data of any given one of the different data sets when taken in…

Navigating Applications Using Side-Mounted Touchpad

Granted: May 8, 2014
Application Number: 20140125617
In one embodiment, a method includes detecting a touch event on a side-mounted touchpad of a computing device during display of a current user interface of an application executing on the computing device. The application includes a navigation hierarchy with a home user-interface layer, multiple sub user-interface layers, and multiple user-interface branches. The method includes determining a particular sub user-interface layer and user-interface branch that the current user interface…

METHODS AND SYSTEMS FOR CONTACT IMPORTING USING A MOBILE DEVICE

Granted: May 1, 2014
Application Number: 20140122585
Techniques to allow a social networking system to import contact information from an external system. In one embodiment, a QR code is provided to a non-mobile computing device to allow a log in to an external system by a user using a mobile computing device. Information from the external system is received after authentication of the user with the external system. The information includes address book information of the user. The address book information includes contact information…