Facebook Patent Applications

GENERATING A CONSOLIDATED SOCIAL STORY IN A FEED OF STORIES FOR A USER OF A SOCIAL NETWORKING SYSTEM

Granted: December 5, 2013
Application Number: 20130325968
To generate dynamic relationship-based content personalized for members of a social networking system, at least one action of one or more members of the social networking system is associated with relationship data for the one or more members to produce consolidated data. One or more elements associated with the consolidated data is identified and used to aggregate the consolidated data. Further exemplary methods comprise weighting by affinity the aggregated consolidated data to generate…

TARGETING TO USERS WITH SEEDED OR DISCOUNTED CREDITS IN A VIRTUAL CURRENCY SYSTEM

Granted: November 28, 2013
Application Number: 20130317906
A virtual currency system keeps track of virtual credits, which can be owned, transferred, purchased, and sold by participants in a virtual economy. Each virtual credit has an internal value and an external value, which define, respectively, the exchange rates for creating and redeeming the virtual credits. Upon creation of new virtual credits, the internal value for those credits is the rate for which real currency was paid per credit. The external value sets the rate at which the…

SEEDING AND DISCOUNTING CREDITS IN A VIRTUAL CURRENCY SYSTEM

Granted: November 28, 2013
Application Number: 20130317972
A virtual currency system keeps track of virtual credits, which can be owned, transferred, purchased, and sold by participants in a virtual economy. Each virtual credit has an internal value and an external value, which define, respectively, the exchange rates for creating and redeeming the virtual credits. Upon creation of new virtual credits, the internal value for those credits is the rate for which real currency was paid per credit. The external value sets the rate at which the…

TEMPLATE SELECTION FOR MAPPING A THIRD-PARTY WEB PAGE TO AN OBJECT IN A SOCIAL NETWORKING SYSTEM

Granted: November 28, 2013
Application Number: 20130318434
A social networking system includes a mechanism for customizing display of content from an external web page. Nodes associated with a web page are included in the social graph based on one or more tags included in a web page, which contain meta-information for defining the node in the social networking system, such as the type of the node. The social networking system retrieves the tags from the markup language document and stores their information in connection with the node for the web…

PRESENTING IMAGE PREVIEWS IN ELECTRONIC MESSAGES

Granted: November 28, 2013
Application Number: 20130318448
An instant message is received from an instant message sender and a determination is made that the instant message includes a link to a web page that was selected by the instant message sender. In response to determining that the instant message includes the link to the web page, an image corresponding to the web page is fetched and stored, and a thumbnail image preview of the fetched image is generated. In addition, the thumbnail image preview of the fetched portion of the web page is…

PROCESSING SELECTED BROWSER REQUESTS

Granted: November 21, 2013
Application Number: 20130311541
Processing a browser request that specifies a destination network resource generally includes intercepting a browser request that specifies a selected destination network resource and redirecting the browser request to a network server that differs from the destination resource specified by the browser request. Processing a browser request also may include intercepting a browser request received from a client computer at a proxy server when the browser request specifies a selected…

Thumbnail Image Previews

Granted: November 21, 2013
Application Number: 20130311902
An instant message is received from an instant message sender and a determination is made that the instant message includes a link to a web page that was selected by the instant message sender. In response to determining that the instant message includes the link to the web page, an image corresponding to the web page is fetched and stored, and a thumbnail image preview of the fetched image is generated. In addition, the thumbnail image preview of the fetched portion of the web page is…

IMAGE EDITING METHOD, IMAGE EDITING DEVICE, AND COMPUTER READABLE MEDIUM FOR STORING IMAGE EDITING PROGRAM

Granted: November 21, 2013
Application Number: 20130311897
An image editing method comprises: a step of acquiring identification information on each of a plurality of operation instruction units for instructing editing of an image, a step of automatically selecting one or more images for editing from a group of images to classify the one or more images into a group of usable images based on the identification information, a step of determining a right to edit reaching contents of processing which each operation instruction unit is authorized to…

Sharing Digital Items

Granted: November 21, 2013
Application Number: 20130311895
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)).…

METHODS OF GRANTING PERMISSION TO ANNOTATE DIGITAL ITEMS

Granted: November 21, 2013
Application Number: 20130311866
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)).…

Organizing Messages in a Messaging System Using Social Network Information

Granted: November 21, 2013
Application Number: 20130311587
A messaging system receives a message that is intended for a recipient, who is a user of a social networking system. An object associated with the message is identified based on the message content and/or metadata associated with the message. The messaging system accesses a social networking system database to obtain social information about a relationship between the recipient and the identified object. The message is then indexed using the social information, wherein an entry for the…

CREATING AND SHARING INTEREST LISTS IN A SOCIAL NETWORKING SYSTEM

Granted: November 21, 2013
Application Number: 20130311572
A social networking service allows a user of the service to create an interest list associated with a topic of interest, where the interest list includes members that may post content via the social networking service. Members of the interest list may post content associated with the topic. Other users of the social network service may subscribe to the list, and these subscribers may then receive a feed that contains the content posted by the members of the interest list.

SUGGESTING CONNECTIONS TO A USER BASED ON AN EXPECTED VALUE OF THE SUGGESTION TO THE SOCIAL NETWORKING SYSTEM

Granted: November 21, 2013
Application Number: 20130311568
To suggest new connections to a user of a social networking system, the system generates a set of candidate users to whom the user has not already formed a connection. The system determines the likelihood that the user will connect to each candidate user if suggested to do so, and it also computes the value to the social networking system if the user does connect to the candidate user. Then, the system computes an expected value score for each candidate user based on the corresponding…

PROCESSING BROWSER REQUESTS TO PROVIDE MULTIPLE PORTIONS OF CONTENT HAVING CONSISTENT APPEARANCE

Granted: November 21, 2013
Application Number: 20130311542
Processing a browser request that specifies a destination network resource generally includes intercepting a browser request that specifies a selected destination network resource and redirecting the browser request to a network server that differs from the destination resource specified by the browser request. Processing a browser request also may include intercepting a browser request received from a client computer at a proxy server when the browser request specifies a selected…

METHOD FOR ENABLING GIFT PREPAY

Granted: November 7, 2013
Application Number: 20130297493
A variation of the invention is a method that: based on an action of a recipient stored in a social networking system, identifies recipient interest in a product; based on an association between the recipient and a sender stored in the social networking system, prompts the sender to supply a fund to be applied to a purchase of the product by the recipient; requests a financial account identifier from the recipient; identifies recipient initiation of a purchase of the product from the…

Providing User Confidence Information to Third-Party Systems

Granted: September 19, 2013
Application Number: 20130247212
An online services system includes a mechanism for providing user confidence information to an external data consumer, and for determining user contribution quality. Using stored information about user actions and interactions, user confidence is evaluated for one or more parameters associated with the validity of the user's account and/or quality of the user's contributions to the online services system. Confidence values are assigned to each parameter, and the values are exposed to…

REAL TIME CONTENT SEARCHING IN SOCIAL NETWORK

Granted: September 19, 2013
Application Number: 20130246390
Indexing and retrieving real time content in a social networking system is disclosed. A user-term index includes user-term partitions, each user-term partition comprising temporal databases. As a post is received from a user, a user identifier, a post identifier, and a post is extracted. An object store communicatively coupled to a temporal database for recently received content is queried to determine whether terms in the post has already been stored. A term identifier is stored in the…

Wireless Social Networking

Granted: August 15, 2013
Application Number: 20130208714
A first device may communicate by joining a wireless mesh network that includes at least one wireless device configured to operate a wireless routing protocol, discovering a group of other wireless devices configured to participate in the wireless mesh network, and accessing an interest metric for a second wireless device in the group of other wireless devices. The interest metric is based in part on a network topology from the wireless mesh network. The interest metric is related to an…

METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR PROVIDING A SHOPPING LIST SERVICE

Granted: August 8, 2013
Application Number: 20130204679
A method and apparatus is disclosed that provides an Internet wish list for deferred purchasing. A user clicks on an add to wish list button located on locations, such as, a product page, a banner ad, or search results to add an item to the wish list. A reminder system is used to remind a user to purchase an item at a future time. The shopping list service may be integrated at a high level of integration and a low level of integration. On a low level of integration a proxy platform is…

SOURCING TERMS INTO A SEARCH ENGINE

Granted: August 8, 2013
Application Number: 20130204870
Information may be presented to a user by receiving a selection of one or more terms passively displayed in a document, loading the terms to a search configuration, generating first results responsive to a user's predicted interest as expressed in the search configuration, and enabling display of the first results.