Will Facebook Patent Destroy Foursquare and Gowalla?
Facebook has been granted patent 7,809,805 which describes,
“Systems and methods for automatically locating web-based social network members are provided. According to one embodiment, contact content including an associated GPS identifier and status for web-based social network members located at or near the same location automatically appears on a GPS-enabled device.”
The patent could be bad news for Foursquare, Gowalla, and other hot young companies in the location based services space. Those start-ups would be the most directly affected since the Facebook patent is focused on social network members, their status updates, and privacy settings. With this patent in hand, Facebook could legally attempt to prevent others from doing what it claims in the patent. On the other hand, it could be a good defensive tool against companies like Microsoft who tend to sue others to gain competitive advantage, especially when it is late to market.
On the surface, the patent sounds like it could mean doom and gloom for any social network and their location based features. However, don’t rush to judgment. There are a few key items to consider when discussing this patent, including the filing date and specific patent language.
First, the filing date of the patent is February 28, 2007, which establishes the opportunity for prior art to invalidate the patent. This is an important date since any service which performs the methods of the patent on or before that date could provide the grounds for invalidating the patent.
The first that comes to mind is Loopt, among others. Loopt provides a location-based service to find your friends based on GPS. To see more about their launch in 2006 see the blog posts here. On the broader issue of location, where GPS is not required, consider DodgeBall, another location-based social network founded in 2000, per Wikipedia. With these two pieces of prior art under consideration, Facebook’s patent on location-based social networks could be narrowed quite a bit. Also by acquiring the patent Facebook could be playing a defensive maneuver to ward off potential lawsuits.
Another issue, touched on in the previous point is location. While Loopt used GPS, and Dodgeball largely-used self-reporting, there are other ways to do location. The standard methods of location identification are:
- GPS
- Self-reporting
- Cell tower identification
- Wifi networks
The Facebook patent’s descriptions and specifications use specific language surrounding GPS location, but earlier I discussed how Loopt used GPS publicly before Facebook. Back in 2006, in a project on mobile advertising, I met with several vendors who were experimenting with both wifi networks and cell tower identification for location targeting since GPS was only available on the mid and high-end phones.
For background, a wifi network usually has an IP address, and the city and other local can usually be extracted from that. For cell towers the, signal coverage defines a fixed and well-known area where a phone could be located. Some cell phone technology also provides soft handoff or multi-tower phone tracking and hand-off to minimize dropped calls, which basically triangulates the location of a cell phone.
Facebook’s patent may very well cover some optimized or key privacy, social networking, and location-based methods for Facebook’s implementation, however there is ample evidence documented and from personal experience that may limit the broad applicability of the patent. As a defensive tool, the patent may still prove useful, however, as an offensive tool, there are other implications to enforcing it.
Enforcing the Facebook location patent could have two key effects:
- Facebook could sue the mobile social networks and seek to bar them from continuing business in their current forms. The likely direct result of those lawsuits would be a licensing agreement where Facebook extracts a licensing fee every application download from those vendors or Facebook negotiates cross-licensing with other patent holders.
- Any enforcement of the patents could drive a massive backlash against Facebook, as the public APIs in use by Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla, and others mean that hundreds or possibly thousands of developers have also built apps which use features which might violate the patent and would be subject to any licensing fees. If those developers suddenly put up a paywall and told their millions of users that they had to pay for the app since Facebook has sued them, well, you could imagine how well that would sit.
I believe that Facebook played its expected corporate role in getting the patent as a nod toward protection of its rights and as a tool in case Facebook itself is sued. I also believe that offensive enforcement of the patent would be a PR mistake as it would alienate developers and users, and risk invalidating the patent when prior art from the companies discussed and others is brought into the equation.
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