This Facebook patent lists Mark Zuckerberg as an inventor and is directed towards selecting social networking system user information for display via a timeline interface. Mr. Zuckerberg was awarded U.S. Patent 8726142 entitled “Selecting social networking system user information for display via a timeline interface” on May 13, 2014. The utility patent has been cited 23 times by other U.S. patents in the field of computer technology and in other fields.

The invention provides a display interface in a social networking system that enables the presentation of information related to a user in a timeline or map view. The system accesses information about a user of a social networking system, including both data about the user and social network activities related to the user. The system then selects one or more of these pieces of data and/or activities from a certain time period and gathers them into timeline units based on their relatedness and their relevance to users. These timeline units are ranked by relevance to the user, and are used to generate a timeline or map view for the user containing visual representations of the timeline units organized by location or time. The timeline or map view is then provided to other users of the social networking system that wish to view information about the user. Link: U.S. Patent 8726142

Facebook filed this utility patent on September 21, 2011 giving it a processing time of 965 days (compared to an average processing time of 1047 in the field). They have a total number of 2008 patents. The first named inventor is Mark E. Zuckerberg of Palo Alto, CA. The patent was allowed by primary examiner Stephen Hong and assistant examiner Matthew Ludwig.

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