The patent for the “pull-to-refresh” feature of Twitter is still pending, but the micro-blogging website has acquired another patent that is even more valuable to the company. This patent is on Twitter itself and it was granted to Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey for being the inventors of the “device independent message distribution platform.” The creators of the micro-blogging site have submitted this request with the US Patent Office back in 2007 and it took the governmental agency five years to grant the patent that lists two (Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey) of the three co-founders as inventors of the messaging service. Surprisingly, the name of the third founder of Twitter, Ev Williams was not included in the patent.
With this patent Twitter has now not only got a strong defence, but the company can now also take legal action against those who it believes have breached on its service. However, it was reported that Twitter is not interested in following this course. The patent number of Twitter is 8,401,009 and it was granted to the company on Tuesday, March 19th. For easier understanding TNW has formatted the patent of Twitter as:
“A system (and method) for device-independent point to multipoint communication is disclosed. The system is configured to receive a message addressed to one or more destination users, the message type being, for example, Short Message Service (SMS), Instant Messaging (IM), E-mail, web form input, or Application Program Interface (API) function call.
The system also is configured to determine information about the destination users, the information comprising preferred devices and interfaces for receiving messages, the information further comprising message receiving preferences. The system applies rules to the message based on destination user information to determine the message endpoints, the message endpoints being, for example, Short Message Service (SMS), Instant Messaging (IM), E-mail, web page output, or Application Program Interface (API) function call.
The system translates the message based on the destination user information and message endpoints and transmits the message to each endpoint of the message.”
Twitter has revealed last spring that the Innovator Patent’s Agreement would ensure that all the work of designers and developers would remain with them. In addition to this, the current CTO of Twitter, Adam Messinger crafted a post, which notes that the micro-blogging site would use the patents only for “purely defensive purposes”. When Messinger created that post he was the Vice President of Engineering at Twitter.
Although, Twitter has received the patent at random timing, but it will help the company a lot, as it is looking forward to issue its IPO in the coming months.
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