Has Facebook patented the news, or at least the news feed, in social-networking environments? On Tuesday, the United States Patent Office granted Facebook a patent for “Dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a social network.” The patent is published and numbered 7,669,123.

Facebook’s patent, which was filed in 2006, describes a “method for displaying a news feed in a social-network environment,” including “generating news items regarding activities associated with a user of a social-network environment,” attaching an “informational link” to at least one of the news items, limiting access to the item to a “predetermined set of viewers,” ordering the news items, dynamically limiting the number of items, and displaying the news items.

How Broad?

That sounds pretty broad, and the social-networking world was all atwitter at the possible ramifications. Writing for ReadWriteWeb, Marshall Kirkpatrick proclaimed, “This could be very big. … MySpace, Flickr, Yahoo, Twitter (?), the sharing part of Google Reader, and even Google Buzz — do all of these sites have technology at the center of their social experiences that falls under this new patent of Facebook’s?”

The patent may not be that broad. Nick O’Neill at the All Facebook blog wrote that the patent doesn’t appear to cover status updates as used by Twitter. “It appears that this patent surrounds implicit actions. This means status updates, which is what Twitter is based on, are not part of this patent.”

“Instead, this is about stories about the actions of a user’s friends. While still significant, the implications for competing social networks may be less substantial,” O’Neill wrote.

But Kirkpatrick disputed that conclusion, writing, “Implicit actions are a very big deal. LinkedIn contacts making new connections or changing their jobs would be the most immediate example that comes to mind. If offering a stream of updates of the non-status…