Twitter has been granted a broad patent for its service, while celebrities lined up today to congratulate it on its seventh birthday. The micro-blogging service is unlikely to use the patent aggressively, if it sticks to a promise made last year.
US patent number 8,401,00 describes a “device independent message distribution platform”, which the patent explains is a service in which users follow each other and messages are broadcast by SMS, or other methods. That’s a fair description of Twitter, though some have pointed out that services such as IRC and LiveJournal did a lot of this, and could be seen as “prior art”.
Celebrities congratulating the service included Richard Branson, Derren Brown and Alastair Campbell – and Chancellor George Osborne chose Budget Day yesterday to send his first tweet.
Twitter (then called Twittr) applied for its patent in 2007. Since then, the firm has announced the Innovator’s Patent Agreement (IPA) which promises to give inventors control of any Twitter patents, and only use them “as a shield rather than a weapon”.
In theory, this means Twitter will only use the patent to defend against other companies which attempt to sue it, but the Agreement does allow it to use patents in offensive litigation against other firms, with the permission of the individuals who created the patent.
Since those owners are none other than Twitter founders Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone, that permission should be readily forthcoming, so it is possible this patent might be used to ward off any attempts by services such as Facebook to make themselves more like Twitter.
For a patent, USPTO 8,401.109 is relatively clear. In part, it describes “a system (and method) for device-independent point to multipoint communication”, explaining that the system can receive a message addressed to one or more destination users, over services such as SMS, instant messaging, email or through an API function call. It then transmits the message to users, according to their preferences.
For today’s birthday, celebrities issued statements (only some of which seem to have been actually tweeted). “To me, Twitter means a way to communicate with people in real-time, highlight good causes and – above all – have fun!” said Richard Branson.
“Twitter provides a cross section of the population with its madness and extremes in tact. Fascinating & exhausting,” added Derren Brown.
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Think further proof of how silly the patent system has become - Twitter is just an extension of methods used for at least the last twenty years - and predating the internet (used on private networks).