FACEBOOK: Zuckerberg applies for patents to make messaging simpler

Many of us may still be discussing Facebook’s recent IPO, but Zuckerberg and the team have been busy applying for a number of rather interesting patents over the past few weeks, according to the US patent office.

The internet has been full of chatter about Facebook, its IPO last week, whether the valuation was worthy and most importantly that Zuckerberg and his girl Priscilla Chan have finally tied the knot. However, none of this has stopped the team over at Facebook HQ from applying for a number of new patents that aim to simplify the way we communicate with one another.

The top four patents, that have recently been published by the US patent office, include Multi Mode Message Reply Interface, Adding Contextual Information to Messages, Organizing Messages Into Conversation Threads and Messaging System with Multiple Messaging Channels. If all are approved these patents combined would allow Facebook to collect together messages from different devices and platforms and put them all together in one place:

“A first message is received via a first electronic message channel (e.g., email). A second message is received via a second electronic message channel (e.g., web-chat) that is different than the first electronic message channel. Both messages are associated with the same set of users of the messaging system.”

From what we can tell this would be a handy feature, but the further down the patent application you read, the more interesting it gets. It seems Facebook intends to use what it knows about your social ties to determine which conversations are the most relevant:

“Social network information is indicative of social relationships between the users of a conversation thread and allows the conversation threads to be organized by their social relevancy.”

Granted Facebook already uses this kind of data to sort out what you see in your News Feed, but it seems it’ll become much more important to understand these social ties when it comes to messaging.

[Via New Scientist]