The Zuck’s first patent finally comes through

Poor Mark Zuckerberg. Seems the Facebook founder’s had to wait six years for his first patent to be filed.

According to ReadWriteWeb, the filing is fairly inconsequential, but no one ever forgets their first right?

The patent is called Dynamically Generating a Privacy Summary, and in its abstract is described as:

… a system and method for dynamically generating a privacy summary is provided. The present invention provides a system and method for dynamically generating a privacy summary. A profile for a user is generated. One or more privacy setting selections are received from the user associated with the profile. The profile associated with the user is updated to incorporate the one or more privacy setting selections. A privacy summary is then generated for the profile based on the one or more privacy setting selections

Basically the patent covers a method of detecting what a social network user’s profile looks like according to their privacy settings, and displays it according to how different people within a person’s network would see it.

Originally the patent was rejected because parts of it were too obvious. Just before its IPO earlier this year however, Facebook decided to resurrect the campaign to have its founder’s first patent recognised.

The language was narrowed and the company reportedly “requested and received numerous interviews with patent examiners regarding what it could do to get this patent through”.

Nice work, your hoodieness.