Yahoo has filed a patent titled “Method and system for customizing views of information associated with a social network user.”
snip…
A method, apparatus, and system are directed towards managing a view of a social network user’s personal information based, in part, on user-defined criteria. The user-defined criteria may be applied towards a user’s relationship with each prospective viewer. The user-defined criteria may include degrees of separation between members of the social network, a relationship to the prospective viewer, as well as criteria based, in part, on activities, such as dating, employment, hobbies, and the like. The user-defined criteria may also be based on a group membership, a strength of a relationship, and the like. Such user-defined relationship criteria may then be mapped against various categories of information associated with social network user to provide customized views of the social networ
Markus sez:
Basically users can select types of users they do not wish to see in search results and then the system automatically filters on that in the future. So when your logged into the site you search based on a subset of the database according to what the user specified and not the whole site. I believe other sites started doing this but that was after April 26, 2004 so if yahoo wanted to enforce the patent once granted they would have to pay, i’ve been doing it for over 4 years so they couldn’t do much to me…..
Tip of the hat to anyone who can further decipher the rest of the claim, which made my head spin just scanning it.
Link to patent application.
[tags: Yahoo]
