Webware

Facebook this week was awarded a patent pertaining to streaming "feed" technology, more specifically "dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a social network," complementing another patent filing that has been published but not yet approved.

The implications for this, as AllFacebook.com pointed out earlier on Thursday, are far-flung: Facebook may choose to pursue action against other social-media sites that potentially violate this patent. Twitter, as AllFacebook points out, is effectively one giant news feed, to the extent that it clearly has influenced some of the changes that Facebook made to its own feed technology.… Read more

Pretty soon, you'll be able to learn a bit more about where your Twitter contacts' tweets are coming from.

CNET has learned that select third-party developers were informed earlier this week about some forthcoming modifications to Twitter's "geo API," the set of developer tools that currently allows Twitter messages to be accompanied by the latitude and longitude coordinates of where they were posted. (For example, if you're updating Twitter client Tweetie from your iPhone, you can opt to tag the tweet with your location and it'll be visible to people reading your Twitter feed.)… Read more

Business reviews site Yelp amounts to an "extortion scheme," according to a class action lawsuit filed Wednesday in a Los Angeles court by two law firms and a Long Beach, Calif., veterinary hospital that claims it was "victimized" by Yelp sales representatives asking for payment in exchange for the removal of negative reviews.

"The plaintiff...asked that Yelp remove a false and defamatory review from the Web site," a release from the law firms alleges. "In response, as set forth in the lawsuit, Yelp refused to take down the review. Instead, the company'… Read more

MIAMI--The overwhelmingly young and male audience at the Future of Web Apps (FOWA) event this week tells you that it's one of those conferences where the attendees don't tend to be marketers, finance guys, or advertisers: they're the kids who write the code.

A company like Facebook obviously wants to be there, and at past FOWA events it's used the soapbox opportunity to market developer initiatives like its application platform and Facebook Connect log-in tool. But this year the focus was instead on open source, with relatively recent hire David Recordon taking the stage rather than … Read more

It might finally be happening--no, really this time! According to Twitter head of product management Anamitra Banerji at an Interactive Advertising Bureau event on Tuesday (recapped by MediaPost), the company is finally seizing upon its status as the Web's hot spot for brands and marketers and is testing a formal advertising platform.

GigaOm's Mathew Ingram says he's heard Twitter "may" be launching that platform in conjunction with a host of both traditional and new media companies at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival, the Austin, Texas confab where Twitter made its official debut in 2007. … Read more

MIAMI--Walk around the Future of Web Apps event in South Beach this week, and you'll see loads of eager young entrepreneurs and developers proudly displaying the names of their fledgling companies on their conference badges.

Aaron Patzer, who founded personal-finance site Mint.com and sold it to Intuit for $170 million last year, might tell them that the company name might be the first place to make changes.

"Choose something with meaning, even if it's expensive and difficult to acquire, rather based on domain name availability, because otherwise, you're going to kill word-of-mouth," he told … Read more

Social games behemoth Zynga denied Monday a rumor that FarmVille, its wildly popular Facebook-based game, would be switching from a free to a subscription-based model at the end of March.

A fan site called FarmVilleFreak.com--yes, that's how popular this game is--re-posted an alleged e-mail received by a reader that announced FarmVille would be moving out of beta and into an expanded version on March 31. It would cost $5.99 per month and would feature new levels and achievements.

That would, of course, make the first day of the allegedly non-free FarmVille to be April Fool'… Read more

Here's another one of Facebook's gradual moves into the e-commerce world: The company announced Thursday a "strategic relationship" with eBay-owned payment system PayPal to make its technology available for the purchase of self-service ads as well as the Facebook Credits currency.

"We want to give the people who use Facebook, as well as advertisers and developers, a fast and trusted way to pay across our service," Dan Levy, director of payment operations at Facebook, said in a release. "As our business has grown, offering local methods of payment has become increasingly important for … Read more

More than a social statement than an actual utility for aspiring Colton Harris-Moore* copycats, a new site called Please Rob Me has popped up to expose the potential pratfalls of the geolocation craze: If you're pushing a "check-in" from Gowalla, Brightkite, or Foursquare to a local restaurant out to your public Twitter stream, you're broadcasting that you aren't home. Which could be taken to mean that your home is ripe for burglary.

Please Rob Me consists exclusively of an aggregation of public Twitter messages that have been pushed through fast-growing location-based networking site Foursquare, one … Read more