US 8037093

I'll run a couple of targeted searches to check for any USPTO/CAFC records beyond the patent text I already have.

US Patent 8,037,093 B2 — Summary

Search note: I ran targeted queries against Google Patents, FreePatentsOnline, RPX/Insight, and general case-law/web sources for the literal string "8037093" and the application number "11/624,088." I did not find any Federal Circuit 2026 docket, appeal, or CAFC proceeding tied to this patent. I also found no litigation (e.g., district court complaint) asserting this patent. I cannot state affirmatively that none exists — absence of hits in my searches is not proof of absence — but nothing surfaced. Treat "no CAFC 2026 activity found" as a search result, not a legal conclusion. The CAFC result my search returned was an unrelated 2026 appeal (Contour IP Holding LLC v. GoPro, Inc., Fed. Cir. No. 2026-2012), which does not involve this patent — I'm flagging it only so you don't confuse it with your target.

Bibliographic data (from the patent record)

Caveat on assignee: The patent's own assignment history shows the invention was originally assigned to Friendster, Inc. and later assigned to Facebook, Inc., with the current listing showing Meta Platforms, Inc. Do not read the Google Patents "Current Assignee" field alone as the full chain of title.

Abstract

Updates to landing pages of users in an online social network are fed from external sources so that content maintained by any one user can be consolidated in a single location regardless of where the changes are made to the content. When an update event occurs, users of the online social network are notified according to various criteria that they have set. With this feature, users can browse through content of other users efficiently.

Plain-language overview of the independent claims

The patent has 20 claims with two independent claims — claim 1 (a method) and claim 11 (a computer system). Claims 2–10 depend from claim 1; claims 12–20 depend from claim 11. The system claim 11 substantially mirrors method claim 1.

Independent Claim 1 — Method (performed by computer system(s) of an online social network)

Five functional steps:

1. Access stored configuration for a first user's profile page. The stored data includes (a) an identifier of an external web site (outside the social network) and (b) an indication of what content should be added/updated on the profile page if content is added or updated at that external site.
2. Determine whether content has actually been added or updated on the external web site.
3. If it has, add or update that content on the first user's profile page (i.e., pull the external content through into the social-network profile).
4. Access tracking preferences of one or more second users. Each second user's preferences (i) identify which social-network users they want to track, and (ii) indicate which types of content they want to track.
5. Compare the new/updated content against those preferences, and notify matching users. If the content substantially matches a second user's preferences, tell that second user the first user's profile page was updated — the notification includes an activatable link to the first user's profile page.

Plain reading: It's a "syndicate external content into a social-network profile, then push filtered alerts with a clickable link" claim. The novelty hook is the combination of (i) external-source-to-profile ingestion and (ii) preference-filtered notification by both person and content type.

Independent Claim 11 — Computer System

Same subject matter as claim 1, but drafted as a system: one or more processors plus memory storing instructions that, when executed, cause the system to perform the identical five-step sequence (access profile-page/external-site data → detect external update → add/update profile content → access second users' tracking preferences identifying tracked users and content types → compare and notify matching users with an activatable link).

Plain reading: A system claim covering the same functionality as claim 1, recited as processor-plus-memory instructions rather than as a method.

Selected dependent claims (context)

• Claim 2 / 12: Detecting the external update by issuing a query to the external site and receiving the updated content in response.
• Claim 3 / 13: The query includes the first user's user ID and password (credentialed retrieval from the external site).
• Claims 4–6 / 14–16: Content-type specific: a photo from a photo-sharing site; a video from a video-sharing site; a blog/blog post from a blogging site.
• Claim 7 / 17: Profile page structured with a first section for the profile as maintained by the user and a second section for the external-site content.
• Claim 8 / 18: The social-network system maintains the user ID and password used to retrieve external content.
• Claim 9 / 19: Upon receiving a request for the first user's profile page from a second user, generate the page with the external content and communicate it for display.
• Claim 10 / 20: "Adding/updating" may be either adding/updating a portion of the content itself or a link to the content on the profile page.

Practical/description-level context (not claim language)

The specification describes: a queue → filter process (applying per-user rules) → updated-content buckets → output processing pipeline; notification by e-mail, web page, or RSS feed, with user-selectable frequency; caching of RSS feeds with minimum/maximum lifetimes; and credentialed queries to external sites (e.g., Xanga, Flickr, YouTube). It also names onxiam and Yahoo! 360° as prior approaches — useful if you're assessing prior art posture.

Uncertainty / confidence notes

• High confidence on title, inventors, filing/priority/issue dates, application number, publication number, abstract, and claim text — all drawn from the authoritative full patent text you supplied.
• Medium confidence on the current assignee string and on the "Active / expires 2026-11-07" status — these come from Google Patents' listing, which is explicitly flagged on the page as an assumption, not a legal conclusion. Verify via USPTO PatentCenter/Assignment records before relying on them.
• Low/negative confidence on any CAFC 2026 activity — my searches produced no hit matching this patent number. Verify independently through PACER, CourtListener, and the Federal Circuit docket if a litigation/appeal check is material to your analysis.
• Note on dates: your prompt states the current date as April 26, 2026; I mention this only because one search result carried a July 8, 2026 date stamp, which is inconsistent with that frame. I have not relied on that document.

Would you like me to draft claim charts, a prior-art comparison, or a family-tree table for the continuation/continuation-in-part offspring (e.g., US 8,694,542; US 10,171,599; US 10,275,410; US 10,353,915; US 10,412,179; US 10,798,190; US 9,571,593; US 8,874,546; US 8,874,612)?

I'll research litigation involving US patent 8037093. Let me run several searches.

Let me search litigation-specific sources.

Let me try more targeted litigation databases.

Litigation Search Report — U.S. Patent No. 8,037,093

Prepared: April 26, 2026
Subject patent: U.S. Patent No. 8,037,093 B2 ("Feeding updates to landing pages of users of an online social network from external sources")

• Application No. 11/624,088 | Filed: January 17, 2007 | Priority: September 12, 2006 | Issued: October 11, 2011
• Original assignee: Friendster, Inc. → Facebook, Inc. → current assignee of record: Meta Platforms, Inc.
• Continuation-in-part of U.S. App. Ser. No. 11/531,154 (issued as U.S. Patent No. 9,798,789)

Bottom line

I could not identify any known litigation — district court, ITC, or PTAB — that specifically asserts or challenges U.S. Patent No. 8,037,093. To the extent any such action exists, it is not reflected in the sources I was able to reach.

Search methodology and results

I ran targeted searches against litigation-oriented sources (Unified Patents Portal litigation case list, Docket Alarm, CourtListener/RECAP results, and general patent-litigation coverage) using the literal identifier 8,037,093 / "8037093".

Important caveat on search reliability: Several of my queries hit a step limit before returning complete results, so this report is based on the searches that did complete. It is not a substitute for a paid docket research run (Lex Machina, Docket Navigator, PACER direct, or a Westlaw/Lexis litigation history report). A conclusive "no litigation" opinion should be confirmed through those tools directly, plus a run of the patent's full file history and any recorded assignments for litigation-related transfers.

Why a "no litigation" result is plausible here

1. Ownership posture. The '093 patent has been held by practicing operating companies (Friendster → Facebook → Meta) rather than by an NPE/PAE. Operating companies generally assert patents defensively or not at all, which reduces the likelihood of it appearing in an infringement docket.
2. It is one member of a large family. The family (e.g., U.S. Patent Nos. 9,798,789; 8,694,542; 8,874,546; 8,874,612; 10,412,179; 10,353,915; 10,275,410; 10,171,599; 10,798,190; 9,571,593) shares a common priority date. Assertions in the social-media feed space historically have focused on other family members or on unrelated patents, and the citation lists I retrieved reference patent families, not lawsuits.
3. No PTAB challenge surfaced. The '093 patent's subject matter (aggregating external RSS/blog/photo/video updates into a social-network profile page) falls within the post-AIA covered-business-method landscape, so a CBM or IPR challenge is conceivable — but none was identified.

⚠️ Numbers that look similar but are NOT this patent (do not conflate)

During my searches, unrelated matters surfaced involving similar-looking but distinct identifiers. Per standing instruction not to auto-correct identifiers, I flag these explicitly so they are not mistaken for the '093 patent:

• U.S. Patent No. 8,009,037 — asserted by WirelessWerx IP LLC (via Ramey LLP) against Flytrex Inc. (E.D. Tex., filed Sept. 22, 2025) and against Raytheon (W.D. Tex.). This is a different patent (directed to controlling mobile entities / mapping), not 8,037,093.
• U.S. Patent No. 7,454,002 — SportBrain Holdings IPR matters (e.g., Unified Patents v. SportBrain, IPR2016-01464). Different patent.
• U.S. Patent No. 7,398,209 — Meta Platforms, Inc. v. Dialect, LLC, IPR2025-01334 (Meta as petitioner). Different patent.

None of these involve 8,037,093.

Recommended next steps to confirm

Because this is a "possible absence" rather than a verified negative, I recommend confirming with one or more of the following before relying on it:

1. Docket Navigator / Lex Machina — run a "patent in suit" query on 8,037,093 (these cover all federal district courts plus ITC and PTAB).
2. USPTO Patent Center / Public PAIR — review the '093 file wrapper for any § 8 contested case, supplemental examination, or reexamination requests.
3. USPTO Assignment records — check for any assignments to third parties (e.g., an NPE) that could indicate assertion activity after the Meta change-of-name entry.
4. Unified Patents Portal — filter the litigation case list by patent number directly at https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist.
5. CourtListener — full-text RECAP search for "8,037,093" and "8037093."

If you would like, I can draft the specific query strings for each of those databases.

Summary answer: Based on the completed searches, no litigation (and no PTAB proceeding) is known involving U.S. Patent No. 8,037,093. I state this with the caveat that my search did not fully exhaust paid docket databases, so the result should be verified through Lex Machina/Docket Navigator/PACER before being treated as conclusive.

Proceedings overview

Zero. The structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block (USPTO ODP ingest) lists no AIA trial proceedings — no IPR, no PGR, no CBM — for US 8,037,093 B2, and my independent web searches did not surface any petition, institution decision, Final Written Decision, or Federal Circuit appeal directed at this patent. Breakdown by status is therefore: active 0 / claims invalidated 0 / claims sustained 0 / settled 0 / institution denied 0.

Bottom-line defensive posture: all 20 claims (independent claims 1 and 11 plus dependents 2–10 and 12–20) are untested at the PTAB and presumptively valid. There is no canceled-claim shield to hand a defendant and no FWD to cite. The good news for a defendant lies elsewhere: (i) no petitioner is estopped under § 315(e)(2) because no IPR was ever filed, so every prior-art ground remains available to a first petitioner; and (ii) per the Google Patents listing, the patent's adjusted expiration is 2026-11-07 — roughly six weeks from today (2026-09-29) — which materially blunts the practical value of any petition filed now (see Recommended next steps).

Proceeding-by-proceeding

None exist. I will not manufacture docket numbers, panels, or claim-level dispositions. For completeness, here is what "no proceedings" means in each of the requested fields:

(no proceeding number) — N/A v. Meta Platforms, Inc. (as current listing; originally Friendster, Inc. → Facebook, Inc.)

• Type: N/A — no Inter Partes Review, Post-Grant Review, or Covered Business Method review on file.
• Filed: N/A
• Status: N/A (verbatim from structured data: the ODP API returns no AIA trial proceedings for this patent).
• Judge panel: N/A — no panel has ever been assigned.
• Petition grounds: N/A — no ground has ever been asserted (no § 102, § 103, or § 112 challenge at the Board).
• Institution decision: N/A — never instituted, never denied; nothing to institute.
• Final Written Decision: N/A — the Board has never ruled on any claim of this patent. No claim of US 8,037,093 has been canceled, confirmed, or even addressed by the PTAB.
• Settlement / termination: N/A
• Appeal: N/A — there is no FWD to appeal, hence no CAFC docket for this patent. (My earlier searches likewise found no CAFC proceeding tied to this patent number, consistent with the null PTAB result.)
• Defensive value: Because the patent is unchallenged, a defendant cannot short-circuit an assertion with an existing invalidity judgment. The defensive playbook is a first-filed IPR — but the ~2026-11-07 expiry makes the economics poor.

Diligence record (what I checked, and what the noise was)

• Canonical source: the structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block in this prompt (USPTO Open Data Portal ingest) — returns none.
• Web searches attempted: queries targeting the literal strings "8037093", "8,037,093", "US8037093B2", and "Feeding updates to landing pages" combined with IPR/PGR/CBM/PTAB/petition terms.
• Result: no hit matched this patent. Every apparent "hit" was a false positive worth naming so it isn't carried forward as fact:
  • A snippet reading "The claims of the '093 patent were found patentable by the Examiner (after an appeal to the Board and reopened prosecution)…" refers to an unrelated '093 patent on vehicle airbags (AVS; Kithil/Wilfert art) — not US 8,037,093.
  • "8037093" also matches a UK foreign priority application number on US 4,430,939 (linear shaped charges, 1984) — unrelated.
  • Docket Alarm PTAB pages surfaced for other patents (e.g., IPR2024-00249, IPR2025-01334, IPR2019-012xx series) with no connection to the '093 patent.
• Confidence: High that no AIA trial proceeding exists as of the ODP ingest. This is a search result, not a legal conclusion — § 314(a) filings not yet indexed, and any petition filed within the last few weeks, would not appear. Verify in PTAB E2E (https://e2e.uspto.gov/) and PTAB Decisions (https://www.uspto.gov/patents/ptab/decisions) before relying on it.

Strategic summary

Claim status: every claim is UNTESTED. Claims 1–20 of US 8,037,093 have never been construed by the Board, never been the subject of an institution decision, and never been the subject of a Final Written Decision. Independent claim 1 (method) and independent claim 11 (system) both stand intact, along with the credentialed-retrieval dependents (claims 3/13 — user ID and password in the query), the content-type dependents (claims 4–6/14–16 — photo/photo-sharing site, video/video-sharing site, blog/blogging site), the two-section profile-page dependents (claims 7/17), the stored-credential dependents (claims 8/18), the on-request-generation dependents (claims 9/19), and the "portion of the content or a link" dependents (claims 10/20). There is no narrowing amendment, no certificate of correction, and no IPR-driven claim cancellation to lean on.

Estoppel landscape. Because nobody has petitioned, no party is subject to § 315(e)(2) estoppel on this patent, and there is no § 325(e)(2) estoppel either. That is a genuine advantage for a first mover: a defendant filing today can raise any § 102/§ 103 ground, including art that was before the examiner, without an estoppel shadow. Conversely, if your client is a privy of a party that filed nothing, your ground set is unconstrained. Two statutory limits do apply and are worth stating plainly: (1) PGR is unavailable — this patent's effective filing date is 2006-09-12, far before the 2013-03-16 AIA cutoff for post-grant review; and (2) CBM is unavailable on two independent grounds — the claims are directed to social-network content syndication, not a "financial product or service" (and the specification's only commercial references are to blog/photo/video feeds), and the CBM transitional program has sunset. IPR is the sole AIA trial vehicle, and no one has used it.

Pattern signals. No repeated petitioner, no joinder, no Unified Patents or RPX involvement, no patent-owner appeal activity — because there is no proceeding at all. Two structural facts explain the silence: (a) the patent is held by Meta Platforms, Inc., a large operating company that acquired it from Friendster in 2010, and large operating companies' patents are rarely IPR targets absent assertion; and (b) my searches surfaced no district court complaint asserting US 8,037,093. If you are fielding a demand letter citing this patent, the letter is more likely to come from a party other than Meta (or from a Meta licensing posture) than from a litigation campaign that would have already drawn IPR fire. Worth noting for petition drafting: the face of the patent lists US 7,669,123 (Facebook's own Zuckerberg et al. "Dynamically Providing a News Feed" patent) among the cited references, alongside US 7,249,123, US 6,879,965, US 2005/0203801 (Morgenstern), US 2005/0198299 (Beck), and US 2006/0117378 (Tam) — that art-of-record set is the natural starting point, but being listed on the face does not mean any reference was applied in a rejection. Pull the file history before assuming anything about the prosecution record.

Recommended next steps

1. Do not build a defense on PTAB results — there are none. If opposing counsel or a demand letter implies the patent has been "invalidated" or "narrowed at the PTAB," that is false for US 8,037,093. No claim has been canceled; claims 1–20 are all live.
2. If you intend to challenge validity, calendar the expiry first. The Google Patents listing shows an adjusted expiration of 2026-11-07 (a listed assumption, not a legal determination — verify via USPTO PatentCenter). On the Board's normal clock, a petition filed today would draw an institution decision around Q2 2027 and an FWD around Q4 2027 — after expiry. That does not automatically bar an IPR (the Board can institute on an expired patent, and IPR has been used to obtain cancellation of expired claims), but it does erase the practical upside and strengthens a discretionary-denial argument under the Board's efficiency/Fintiv practice. Confirm the actual expiration date against the Patent Term Adjustment certificate before spending on a petition.
3. Exposure on the back end is damages-only, and bounded. Expiry eliminates injunctive relief and future royalties; past damages remain reachable for the six-year lookback under § 286. That is now the real battleground — not invalidity.
4. If you do file, file early and file on the merits. With no estoppel and no prior PTAB record, your petition should be built from scratch on the art of record plus the specification's own admissions: the spec expressly names onxiam and Yahoo! 360° as prior approaches to consolidating multiple online identities, and describes RSS/Atom/SOAP feeds and web crawling as known mechanisms. Those admissions are potential § 103 anchors for claims 1 and 11.
5. Watch the family, not just the patent. US 8,037,093 is the CIP root of a large family, all claiming 2006-09-12 priority: US 9,798,789; US 9,571,593; US 10,798,190; US 10,412,179; US 10,353,915; US 10,275,410; US 10,171,599; US 8,694,542; US 8,874,546; US 8,874,612; and the abandoned US 2014/0164521. Several of these have later adjusted expirations (e.g., US 8,694,542 listed active to 2027-01-30; US 10,798,190 to 2029-07-19; US 10,412,179 to 2031-03-08). A demand letter citing "the '093 patent" may really be aimed at the family. Map the asserted claim set to the correct family member before assuming the November 2026 expiry ends your problem.
6. Verify independently. PTAB E2E: https://e2e.uspto.gov/ · PTAB Decisions: https://www.uspto.gov/patents/ptab/decisions · CourtListener: https://www.courtlistener.com/ · Google Patents record: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US8037093B2](/patent/US8037093B2)/en

Contradiction flagged (per instructions): the previously generated summary states "your prompt states the current date as April 26, 2026." This prompt states today's date is 2026-09-29. I have built this section on 2026-09-29, which puts the ~2026-11-07 adjusted expiration roughly six weeks out. If the April date were operative, the expiry would be ~six months out and the IPR-economics analysis in steps 2–3 would shift materially. Treat the date discrepancy as unresolved and confirm before relying on the "expires next month" framing.

I'll run targeted searches to try to recover the actual USPTO assignment reel/frame records and correspondents for this patent.

Good context on the commercial chain. Now let me try to pin down the actual reel/frame numbers, the Balthaser security-interest link, and the Meta change-of-name record.

Assignment Record Reconstruction — US 8,037,093 B2

Data-access note (read first): I could not complete a live query of the USPTO Assignment Center or the Assignment Search portal within this session (both are dynamic search applications, and my remaining retrievals returned no indexing of the reel/frame and correspondent fields for this patent). What I can report with confidence is the set of assignment events as surfaced in the legal-events record of the authoritative patent text and corroborated by contemporaneous press reporting. Reel/frame numbers and the correspondent-of-record (recording attorney/firm) were NOT retrieved. I am flagging every field I could not recover rather than inventing it — per the operating rules, fabricating a reel/frame or correspondent would be worse than the gap.

Inventors

Unusual-pattern check — negative. All three inventors assigned to the operating company (Friendster, Inc.) on the filing date, consistent with standard employee invention-assignment practice. There is no evidence of inventors departing within 12 months of filing driving a fire-sale. The priority date is Sept. 12, 2006; the CIP was filed Jan. 17, 2007; the portfolio did not move until 2009–2010 (~3.5 years later). The timing pattern here is corporate decline of the assignee, not inventor flight. Caveat: I did not retrieve individual employment/termination records; "probable" reflects the on-record assignment, not a personnel file.

Original assignee

Friendster, Inc. (San Francisco / Mountain View, CA) — the record assignee on the issued patent, per the Jan. 17, 2007 recorded assignment from all three inventors.

• Did they ship a product embodying the claims? Yes — Friendster operated one of the earliest mass-market social networks (launched 2002). The claim subject matter (syndicating external blog/photo/video feeds into a member profile page and pushing filtered update notifications) is directly on the Friendster product line, and the specification names Flickr, YouTube, and Xanga as the external sources.
• Primary line of business: Online social networking; later pivoted to gaming/friendster-as-a-portal.
• Current status: Not operating as an independent social network. Peak passed by ~2008; the Southeast Asian user base was the surviving asset. Friendster was acquired by MOL Global (Malaysia) in December 2009 for ~$39.5M, and the patent portfolio was then sold to Facebook, Inc. in 2010. No Chapter 7/11 bankruptcy proceeded that I could locate — this is a distressed out-of-court asset sale, not a bankruptcy-court fire sale. (Status reflects press reporting, not an SEC filing retrieved in-session. Do not treat as a formal proceeding check.)

Assignment timeline

Chain as recorded (Google Patents legal events of US 8,037,093 B2). Reel/frame and correspondent unavailable for all entries — see top note.

• 2007-01-17 (recorded 2007-01-17) — Reel not retrieved/Frame not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Assignment of Assignors' Interest
  • Assignor: Lindstrom, Kent; MacKinnon, Ross Ainsley; Tiu, Jr., William K.
  • Assignee: Friendster, Inc.
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: Original employment/invention assignment, recorded on the application's filing date; standard.

• 2009-12-22 (recorded 2009-12-22) — Reel not retrieved/Frame not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Security Agreement
  • Assignor: Friendster, Inc.
  • Assignee: Balthaser Online, Inc.
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: Securitization / lien — not an ownership transfer. Balthaser Online was the plaintiff in Balthaser Online, Inc. v. Network Solutions LLC et al., No. 2:08-cv-00430 (E.D. Tex.), which named Friendster as a defendant over U.S. Pat. 7,000,180. A security interest recorded by the adverse patent plaintiff against the defendant's IP suggests a settlement/financing lien covering Friendster's portfolio. This is an inference from the record type plus the litigation overlap — I did not retrieve the underlying document, so the consideration is unconfirmed.

• 2010-02-09 (recorded 2010-02-09) — Reel not retrieved/Frame not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Release of Limited Intellectual Property Security Agreement
  • Assignor: Balthaser Online, Inc.
  • Assignee: Friendster, Inc.
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: Lien release/clean-up, executed ~4 months before the recorded Facebook assignment — i.e., the security interest was extinguished to deliver clean title into the sale.

• 2010-06-07 (recorded 2010-06-07; executed 2010-05-13 per press reporting) — Reel not retrieved/Frame not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Assignment of Assignors' Interest
  • Assignor: Friendster, Inc.
  • Assignee: Facebook, Inc.
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: Portfolio sale. Facebook acquired 7 issued patents + 11 applications (~$40M in cash, advertising, and virtual-goods consideration per reporting). Press says the deal was struck with MOL Global; the USPTO record nonetheless shows Friendster, Inc. as assignor, which is consistent with MOL having bought the company (equity), leaving Friendster, Inc. as record owner. Flagged discrepancy: no MOL Global assignment step appears in the events record for this patent.

• 2010-08-24 (recorded 2010-08-24) — Reel not retrieved/Frame not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Assignment of Assignors' Interest
  • Assignor: Friendster, Inc.
  • Assignee: Facebook, Inc.
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: Second/conforming recordation to the same assignee ~2.5 months after the June record — likely a follow-on batch recording or confirmatory assignment covering additional assets in the 18-item portfolio. I cannot confirm whether it covers this patent specifically.

• 2021-12-20 (recorded 2021-12-20) — Reel not retrieved/Frame not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Change of Name
  • Assignor: Facebook, Inc.
  • Assignee: Meta Platforms, Inc.
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: Change of name only — no change in beneficial ownership; Facebook, Inc. rebranded to Meta Platforms, Inc.

Correspondent gap: Because I could not retrieve the correspondent fields, signal 3 (repeat recording attorney) cannot be evaluated for this chain. I will not guess at a firm. Verification requires a live Assignment Center query — https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (also https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html), search by patent number 8037093.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 8037093
    2007 : Filed by Friendster Inc
         : Inventors assign to Friendster
    2009 : Balthaser Online security interest recorded
    2010 : Security interest released
         : Friendster assigns to Facebook
         : Second Facebook assignment recorded
    2021 : Facebook change of name to Meta

NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — not present. The chain runs Friendster, Inc. → Facebook, Inc. → Meta Platforms, Inc. Every assignee is (or was) a large operating social-network company. No licensing-only LLC appears as an owner. The only "IP-flavored" name in the record, Balthaser Online, is a lienholder, not an assignee, and the lien was released (2010-02-09).

2. Known asserter in the chain — unclear / partial. Balthaser Online, Inc. appears as holder of a security interest (reel/frame not retrieved; 2009-12-22 → released 2010-02-09). Balthaser Online is a known patent plaintiff (the rich-media campaign against 20 defendants, including Friendster, in E.D. Tex.), but it was never an owner of US 8,037,093. So the "known asserter" flag attaches only to a security interest, not title. Mark this unclear — noteworthy for context, insufficient as an ownership-pattern finding.

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — cannot assess. Correspondent-of-record fields were not retrieved for any of the six events. No finding either way. This is the single largest gap in the analysis; a live Assignment Center pull is needed.

4. Cascading transfers through chained LLCs in <24 months — not present. The 2009–2010 activity is two lien events plus two assignments to the same operating-company assignee (Facebook), not a daisy-chain of shells.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — not present for an NPE suit. No infringement suit naming US 8,037,093 was located. Separately, Facebook later asserted Friendster-origin social-networking patents defensively/offensively in its 2012 counterclaims against Yahoo; I could not confirm this specific patent was among the asserted claims.

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — not present. Friendster's assets were sold out of court (MOL Global ~Dec. 2009; patents to Facebook 2010). No Chapter 7/11 proceeding located. This is a distressed operating-company divestiture, a materially different (and weaker) signal than a bankruptcy-court sale.

7. Privateering — not present. Facebook bought the portfolio into an operating company to control the IP ahead of its IPO — the opposite of handing it to an outside asserter. No SEC filing or Patent Progress/EFF coverage indicating Facebook transferred these patents to an NPE was located.

8. Defensive aggregator — not present. The chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT, Unified Patents, or OIN. It terminates at Meta Platforms, Inc. The patent is therefore not neutralized by a defensive aggregator.

Verdict

Operating-company assertion.

The recorded chain is a clean operating-company line — all three inventors assigned to Friendster, Inc. on 2007-01-17; Friendster then assigned to Facebook, Inc. (recorded 2010-06-07, executed 2010-05-13, and again 2010-08-24); and Facebook's name changed to Meta Platforms, Inc. (2021-12-20) — with the only intervening events being a security interest held by Balthaser Online, Inc. (2009-12-22) and its release (2010-02-09), neither of which transferred title. The current assignee manufactures products (Facebook/Meta's feed and profile surfaces) that embody the claims, the portfolio was acquired to control social-networking IP ahead of an IPO rather than to assert from a shell, and no NPE ownership, no bankruptcy sale, and no pre-litigation shell transfer is present. The one qualifier is negative evidence: reel/frame and correspondent fields were not retrieved, and signal 3 could not be evaluated — a live Assignment Center pull is required to close that gap and to confirm no omitted intermediate (e.g., MOL Global) step in the Friendster→Facebook linkage.

Verify at: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ — search patent number 8037093 (mirror: https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html). Request reel/frame and correspondent for all six events listed above.

I'll verify the patent record and the key cited references before building the prior-art analysis.

Let me verify the remaining cited references.

Prior-Art Analysis — US 8,037,093 B2

Target patent confirmed. I searched for the literal string "8037093" (application 11/624,088) rather than similar numbers. The record I retrieved matches the authoritative text: Feeding updates to landing pages of users of an online social network from external sources, US 8,037,093 B2, filed 2007-01-17, priority 2006-09-12, granted 2011-10-11, inventors Tiu/Lindstrom/MacKinnon. Sources: https://patents.google.com/patent/US8037093/en ; https://www.freepatentsonline.com/8037093.html ; https://insight.rpxcorp.com/patent/[US8037093B2](/patent/US8037093B2).

Tool limitation / honesty note: I ran out of search steps before I could pull the full text of every one of the 19 cited references. I fully verified the 8037093 record and the full text/spec/claims of four references (US 7,669,123; US 2005/0203801; US 2006/0117378; US 6,879,965) plus the applicant's own publication. For the remaining references I rely on the patent's own citation table (dates are from the authoritative patent text) plus background knowledge of their subject matter. I flag confidence per entry. Nothing below is a substitute for reading each reference's full specification and claims.

1. The controlling legal frame (must be settled before "anticipation" means anything)

US 8,037,093 is a pre-AIA patent (effective priority/filing all pre-dates March 16, 2013), so 35 U.S.C. §§ 102(a), (b), (e) and 103 govern — not the AIA's § 102(a)(1)/(a)(2).

Two date subtleties matter a great deal here:

1. CIP priority. The application is a continuation-in-part of 11/531,154 (filed 2006-09-12). Claims are entitled to the parent's date only for subject matter disclosed in the parent. The subject matter of granted claims 1–20 — feeding content into a profile page from an external web site and notifying by person + content-type with an activatable link — is the new matter the specification itself attributes to this CIP. The likely effective filing date for these claims is therefore 2007-01-17, with the § 102(b) one‑year critical date at 2006-01-17, and 2006-09-12 available as the § 102(a) invention-date reference point at most. I state this as an analytical probability, not a certainty — it depends on what the parent disclosed.

2. Dependent claims cannot be anticipated independently. Every claim 2–10 incorporates all limitations of claim 1; claims 12–20 incorporate all limitations of claim 11. So a reference "anticipates claim 4" only if it discloses the entirety of claim 1 plus the photo/photograph limitation. This single point disposes of most of the entries below.

2. The 19 references cited on the face of US 8,037,093

3. Reference-by-reference: description and potential § 102 anticipation

1. US 2004/0044566 A1 — Bostelmann et al., "Landing page and channel identifier in multichannel marketing system"

• Dates: priority 2002-08-30; published 2004-03-04. § 102(b) (published >1 yr before either candidate critical date).
• Description: Marketing campaign infrastructure in which a "landing page" is associated with a channel identifier to track which marketing channel drove a visitor.
• Potential anticipation: None. It uses the word "landing page" in the marketing sense and discloses no social network, no external-content ingestion, no tracking preferences, no person/type-filtered notification. Relevant only to establishing that "landing page" was a known term. Confidence: high that it does not anticipate; medium on internal detail (not read in full).

2. US 2005/0060417 A1 — Rose, "Automated electronic personal preference & proxy network"

• Dates: priority 2003-09-16; published 2005-03-17. § 102(b).
• Description: Storing a user's electronic preferences and acting as a proxy across network resources according to those preferences.
• Potential anticipation: None on its face. It supplies a generic "preferences/agent" teaching, potentially relevant to the tracking-preferences element (d) of claim 1 and to § 103 combination, but it discloses no social-network profile page, no external-site content detection, and no notification with an activatable link. Confidence: medium.

3. US 6,879,965 B2 — Hood & Fung (Passgate Corp.), "Method, system and computer readable medium for web site account and e‑commerce management from a central location" (verified)

• Dates: application 09/879,964 filed 2001-06-14; granted 2005-04-12; priority 2000-03-01. § 102(b). Sources: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US6879965B2](/patent/US6879965B2) ; wiki listing confirms inventor Hood/Fung and dates.
• Description: From a central web site, parses the form pages of destination web sites, maps fields, and performs registration/login at those external sites using stored user information. This is genuinely a "central location stores your credentials and acts at external sites" teaching.
• Potential anticipation: None of claims 1–20 — it lacks the social network, the profile page, and the notification step, so it cannot reach even dependent claim 3/13 (which requires all of claim 1 first). It is, however, the most on-point cited art for the claim 3/13 limitation "the query comprises a user ID and password of the first user" and for claim 8/18 ("maintains a user ID and password for retrieving the content"). Expect it in a § 103 combination rather than as an anticipatory reference. Confidence: high on the credential-management teaching.

4. US 2005/0198299 A1 — Beck et al., "Methods and apparatus for identifying and facilitating a social interaction structure over a data packet network"

• Dates: priority 2004-01-26; published 2005-09-08. § 102(b).
• Description: Identifying and building a social-interaction/relationship structure over a network.
• Potential anticipation: None. It is social-graph background art; it discloses no external content feed into a profile and no preference-filtered notification. Confidence: medium.

5. US 2005/0203801 A1 — Morgenstern & Lim, "Method and system for collecting, sharing and tracking user or group associates content via a communications network" (verified full text)

• Dates: application 11/045,164 filed 2005-01-27 (priority 2003-11-26 / 2004-01-27); published 2005-09-15. § 102(b). Sources: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20050203801 ; https://uspto.report/patent/app/20050203801.
• Description: The "GRAB BAG." A viewer browses another user's content, adds it to the viewer's own content collection, and when incorporated, "it appears with a link to the original author." Tracks revisions/dissemination; content can be referenced rather than duplicated.
• Potential anticipation: No claim 1/11 anticipation — it is a manual, viewer-initiated "grab," not automatic detection of an update at an external site, and it has no person/content-type notification. It is, however, relevant background to the claim 10/20 concept of "adding or updating a link to the content on the profile page" and to content-collection across users. Confidence: high (full text read).

6. US 2006/0117378 A1 — Tam et al., "System and method for creating a secure trusted social network" (verified full text)

• Dates: application 11/267,668 filed 2005-11-04; published 2006-06-01; priority 2004-11-04. Published before 2006-09-12 → § 102(a) (less than one year before filing). Sources: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20060117378A1 ; https://insight.rpxcorp.com/patent/US20060117378A1. (Note the assignment records and later continuations list priority as 2004-11-03/04 — I did not auto-correct; both variants appear in the record.)
• Description: Trusted peer-to-peer resource sharing gated by degree of separation and by authentication (userID/password); digital photo/video/file sharing among trusted peers.
• Potential anticipation: None. It is the cited art for the social-network "degrees of separation" and credentialed-access framework (see the specification's FIG. 1 discussion and the "user ID and password" query in the 8037093 spec). It does not feed external content into a landing page or notify by tracked type. Confidence: high (full text read).

7. US 2007/0005754 A1 — Horvitz et al. (Microsoft), "Systems and methods for triaging attention for providing awareness of communications session activity"

• Dates: filed 2005-06-30; published 2007-01-04. Published after priority but filed before 2006-09-12 → § 102(e) prior art (US application by another, filed before the invention).
• Description: Prioritizing/triaging notifications about activity to control the user's attention.
• Potential anticipation: None. Possibly relevant to the notification concept (element f) and to § 103, but its subject is communications-session awareness, not social-network profile updates. Confidence: medium.

8. US 2007/0060129 A1 — Ramer et al., "Mobile communication facility characteristic influenced search results"

• Dates: filed 2005-09-14; published 2007-03-15. § 102(e).
• Description: Search results influenced by mobile-device characteristics.
• Potential anticipation: None. On its face this appears remote from every element of claims 1–20; I could not independently confirm why the examiner listed it, and I will not invent a rationale. Confidence: low — flag for direct review of the file history.

9. US 2007/0136178 A1 — Wiseman et al. (Microsoft), "Trust based architecture for listing service"

• Dates: filed 2005-12-13; published 2007-06-14. § 102(e).
• Description: Listing/commerce service using a trust model. (Note: the same "Wiseman" name appears in the Justia list associated with US 7,881,969; I treat them as distinct and did not auto-merge.)
• Potential anticipation: None. Background on trust/listing; no external-feed-to-profile or filtered notification. Confidence: low–medium.

10. US 7,249,123 B2 — Elder et al. (IBM), "System and method for building social networks based on activity around shared virtual objects"

• Dates: priority 2002-10-31; granted 2007-07-24. Its underlying application predates the invention → § 102(e) (and its early publication, if any, could also be § 102(b)). Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US7249123B2](/patent/US7249123B2).
• Description: Automatically building social-network relationships from users' shared activity around virtual objects.
• Potential anticipation: None. Relevant to the social graph derived from activity concept; no external web-site content ingestion and no preference/type-filtered notification. Confidence: medium.

11. US 2007/0171716 A1 — Wright et al., "System and method for visualizing configurable analytical spaces in time for diagrammatic context representations"

• Dates: filed 2005-11-30; published 2007-07-26. § 102(e).
• Description: Visualization of configurable analytical spaces/diagrams over time.
• Potential anticipation: None. Remote from all elements; no basis to assert anticipation. Confidence: low.

12. US 2007/0220010 A1 — Ertugrul, "Targeted content delivery for networks"

• Dates: filed 2006-03-15; published 2007-09-20. Filed before 2006-09-12 → § 102(e).
• Description: Delivering content targeted to a network user based on profile/interest matching.
• Potential anticipation: None alone, but this is one of the stronger element-level references for the match step of claim 1: "determining whether the content … substantially matches the tracking preferences" (element e). Its targeting, however, is content-to-user-profile matching rather than social-network profile-update notification filtered by tracked person + tracked content type, and it does not disclose the external-site → profile-page ingestion. Best treated as a § 103 combination candidate. Confidence: medium.

13. US 2007/0239538 A1 — Misra, "Incentivized relationship-data communication to select targeted content method and system"

• Dates: filed 2006-04-11; published 2007-10-11. § 102(e).
• Description: Using relationship (social-graph) data, with incentives, to select targeted content for users.
• Potential anticipation: None alone. Relevant to relationship-based content selection (overlaps element d/e concepts) and to § 103. Confidence: medium.

14. US 2007/0271392 A1 — Khopkar, "Generating landing page variants"

• Dates: filed 2006-05-22; published 2007-11-22. § 102(e).
• Description: (Marketing) generation of variant landing pages, e.g., for testing.
• Potential anticipation: None. Cited again for the "landing page" vocabulary; it is a web-marketing document with no social-network or external-feed subject matter. Confidence: medium.

15. US 2007/0282959 A1 — Stern, "Message push with pull of information to a communications computing device"

• Dates: filed 2006-06-02; published 2007-12-06. § 102(e).
• Description: Push messaging combined with pull of information to a device.
• Potential anticipation: None. Potentially marginal background for the "communicate a notification / push" element and for § 103. Confidence: medium.

16. US 2008/0065604 A1 — Tiu, Lindstrom, MacKinnon, "Feeding updates to landing pages … from external sources"

• Dates: published 2008-03-13.
• Status: NOT prior art. This is the applicant's own pre-grant publication of the present application (statutory invention date 2006-09-12; it claims the same priority). It cannot be used against 8037093 under § 102. It appears in the citation list as the publication counterpart of the patent itself. Confidence: high.

17. US 2008/0091834 A1 — Yahoo!, "Systems and methods for establishing or maintaining a personalized trusted social network"

• Dates: listed priority 2006-10-13; published 2008-04-17.
• Status: likely NOT § 102 prior art. Its listed priority (2006-10-13) post-dates the 8037093 priority (2006-09-12) and its filing post-dates the 2007-01-17 CIP filing. Unless it validly claims an earlier benefit date, it is not § 102(a)/(b)/(e) art for these claims. Flag this as an anomaly in the citation list — its inclusion in the "Citations" table should be verified against the actual USPTO Form 892 / file history before anyone relies on it. Confidence: high on the date mismatch; the "why cited" question needs file-history confirmation.

18. US 7,669,123 B2 — Zuckerberg et al. (Facebook), "Dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a social network" (verified)

• Dates: application 11/503,242 filed 2006-08-11 (provisional 2005-12-14); granted 2010-02-23. Filed before 2006-09-12 → § 102(e) prior art. Sources: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US7669123B2](/patent/US7669123B2)/en ; https://ipwatchdog.com/2010/02/26/facebook-social-network-news-feed-patent/.
• Description: Generates news items about a user's activities, attaches an informational/link to the news item, filters the list according to the viewing user's priority settings and the subject user's privacy settings, orders and displays the feed, and can generate a page of information about a user on request.
• Potential anticipation: This is the closest cited reference. Elements (d), (e) and (f) of claim 1 — accessing tracking/priority preferences, filtering activities to a viewing user, and communicating items with an activatable link — are squarely disclosed, and its claim 12 (page-of-information-on-request) overlaps claim 9/19. However, on its face '123 concerns activities within the social network; the record I reviewed does not show it disclosing the external-web-site identifier stored in the first user's profile data and the pull of content from that external site into the profile page (elements a–c). Therefore it does not appear to anticipate claim 1/11 or their dependents outright — but it is the primary § 103 reference to combine against the notification/link/preference-filter limitations. Confidence: high on what '123 discloses; the "no external-source pull" conclusion is based on the materials I could review.

19. US 7,832,003 B2 — Kelly et al. (Microsoft), "Walled gardens"

• Dates: filed 2005-04-28; granted 2010-11-09. § 102(e).
• Description: Controlling/restricting user access to networked content or services within a bounded ("walled garden") environment.
• Potential anticipation: None. Access-control background; overlaps no element of claims 1–20 on its face. Confidence: medium.

4. Bottom line

• No single cited reference appears to anticipate any of claims 1–20 as a matter of § 102 on the record I reviewed. Anticipation of claim 1 or 11 requires one reference to disclose all of: (a) stored external-web-site identifier + content definition in the first user's profile data; (b) detection of an update at that external site; (c) writing the external content/its link into the profile page; (d) the second users' tracked-person + tracked-content-type preferences; (e) the match determination; and (f) the notification with an activatable link. Because every dependent claim incorporates those limitations, the same conclusion extends to claims 2–10 and 12–20.
• The most relevant references (for § 103, and the ones a challenger should focus on):
  1. US 7,669,123 B2 (§ 102(e)) — supplies the preference-filtered, link-bearing notification step and the on-request page generation.
  2. US 2007/0220010 A1 (Ertugrul) (§ 102(e)) — supplies preference/profile-based content matching/targeting.
  3. US 2005/0203801 A1 (Morgenstern/Lim) (§ 102(b)) — supplies cross-user content collection with a link to the original content.
  4. US 6,879,965 B2 (Passgate) (§ 102(b)) — supplies credentialed access to external sites from a central site (claim 3/13, 8/18).
• Anomalies to verify in the file history: (i) US 2008/0091834 A1 is listed but its priority post-dates 8037093's — confirm it is not being relied upon as § 102 art; (ii) US 2008/0065604 A1 is the applicant's own publication and cannot be prior art; (iii) confirm the examiner's actual § 102(a)/(b)/(e)/(103) designations on the Form 892, since they depend on the CIP-priority question in § 1 above, which I resolved only as a probability.

Caveats: dates in the table for references 1–2, 6–15, 17 and 19 come from the patent's own citation table (authoritative as to what the Office listed) and, for those I could not read in full, the substantive "anticipation" conclusions are element-level relevance judgments, not full-reference novelty opinions — they must be confirmed against each reference's complete specification and claims. The § 102 subsection assignments assume the 2006-09-12 / 2007-01-17 critical-date framework in § 1; if the claims are held entitled to the parent's 2006-09-12 date for all limitations, the § 102(a)/(b)/(e) lines shift and should be recomputed.

Want me to build the § 103 combination chart (e.g., US 7,669,123 + Ertugrul for claim 1's match/notify steps, adding Passgate for claims 3/13 and 8/18), or a family/continuation tree tying 8,037,093 to its offspring (8,694,542; 8,874,546; 8,874,612; 10,171,599; 10,275,410; 10,353,915; 10,412,179; 10,798,190; 9,571,593)?

I'll verify the key prior-art references from the patent's citation lists before building the § 103 analysis.

Obviousness Analysis — US 8,037,093 B2 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Note before anything else: I hit my search-step limit mid-query, so the last reference I intended to pull (Ertugrul, US 2007/0220010) was not retrieved. Everything below is grounded either in the authoritative full patent text you supplied or in the searches that did complete. Where I could not verify something, I say so.

1. Legal framework and the controlling date

This patent's application (US 11/624,088) was filed 2007-01-17 and claims priority to 2006-09-12 via CIP of US 11/531,154. That places it squarely in the pre-AIA regime — § 103 as it existed before the America Invents Act, and the Graham v. John Deere / KSR Int'l v. Teleflex framework applies without AIA glosses.

Critical threshold issue I want to flag up front: claim 1 as issued recites accessing "data for a profile page… the data comprising an identifier of a web site that is external to the online social network." The specification's disclosure of third-party ingestion (FIGS. 6–7; the Xanga/Flickr/YouTube RSS feed description) is arguably new matter added by this CIP, not present in the 2006-09-12 parent (US 11/531,154, which is titled and directed to "tracking changes to user content in an online social network"). If so, claims 1–10 are entitled only to the 2007-01-17 filing date for § 102/103 purposes. Effective prior-art window: 2006-09-12 (best case for the patentee) to 2007-01-17 (worst case). Either way, the same references are available, so the conclusion below is robust to that dispute — but a defendant would plead the later date.

PHOSITA: a software engineer with a bachelor's degree in CS/EE and roughly 2–4 years of experience building web applications, including at least working familiarity with HTTP, RSS/Atom syndication, session/credentialed HTTP requests, and database-backed user-profile systems. This is the level the specification itself assumes — it treats RSS feeds, credential-stuffed queries, caching with min/max lifetimes, and FIFO queue processing as routine implementation choices, not inventions.

2. A necessary filter: most of the "Cited By" art on the page is NOT prior art

This is the single most important analytical point on this record.

Every one of the 25 references in the "Cited By (25)" list postdates the 2006-09-12 priority date — e.g., Microsoft's US 7,958,193 ("Social network notifications for external updates," filed 2008-06-27), Microsoft's US 2010/0318925 ("Integrating updates into a social-networking service," 2009-06-12), Salesforce's US 2013/0091229 (2011), Google's US 9,876,748 (2013), and the rest. These are later developments that cite this patent; they cannot invalidate it under § 102(a)/(e). They are useful only as (a) evidence of the field's trajectory and (b) potential § 103 art for the continuation claims, which have later effective dates. Do not put US 7,958,193 in a claim chart against this patent's claim 1. (I mention this because it is the most tempting-looking reference on the page, and it is a trap.)

The genuinely available art falls into three buckets:

3. The strongest references, and what each supplies

(A) Cited on the face of US 8,037,093:

1. US 6,681,369 B2 — Xerox (Meunier, Arregui, Glance), "System for providing document change information for a community of users," filed 1999-05-05, issued 2004-01-20. (link) This is the most potent single reference on the record for the notification half of claim 1. Its claim 1 recites: a document recommendation element providing recommendations based on a user profile; a document registration element "for enabling users to identify a recommended document for which they would like to be notified of changes"; a document change monitoring element that detects a change and reports it "having a type"; and a user notification element for notifying users… when they registered… to be notified of changes to said recommended document. It even recites action elements responding "according to the type of said change," coupled to a collaborative feedback loop among the community. In other words: per-user registration of which documents/entities to track → detection of a change → notification, with change-type conditioning. That maps with uncomfortable precision onto claim 1's steps (d)/(e) — "tracking preferences… identifying one or more users… that the second user wants to track" and "indicating one or more types of content that the second user wants to track."

2. US 2005/0203801 A1 — Morgenstern & Lim, "Method and system for collecting, sharing and tracking user or group associates content via a communications network," priority 2003-11-26, published 2005-09-15. (link) Verified via search. It expressly situates itself in social networks ("Users may be part of affinity groups such as social networks"), 1 discloses server-side collection of content an individual has associated with himself, storage of itemID/itemType metadata for grabbed content, references content so identical items need not be duplicated, and — directly relevant — discloses that content owners "could also take advantage of an interface that informed them about who had collected their content," i.e., event notification about content status changes. The itemType data field is a ready-made mechanism for the "types of content" preference filter of claim 1.

3. US 2005/0198299 A1 — Beck, "Methods and apparatus for identifying and facilitating a social interaction structure over a data packet network," priority 2004-01-26. Cited on the face. Social graph construction and relationship-degree mechanics (useful against the specification's 1/2/3-degree tracking options, which appear in the description at the FIG. 4A discussion rather than in the claims).

4. US 6,879,965 B2 — Passgate, "Method, system and computer readable medium for web site account and e-commerce management from a central location," 2000-03-01. Broadly relevant to centrally storing third-party site credentials and acting on a user's behalf at remote sites — a secondary reference for claim 3/13 (query containing the first user's user ID and password) and claim 8/18 (the social network "maintains a user ID and password").

5. US 7,249,123 B2 — IBM, "System and method for building social networks based on activity around shared virtual objects," 2002-10-31; US 2006/0117378 A1 — Tam, "System and method for creating a secure trusted social network," 2004-11-04; US 7,832,003 B2 — Microsoft, "Walled gardens," 2005-04-28; US 2007/0005754 A1 — Microsoft, "Systems and methods for triaging attention for providing awareness of communications session activity," 2005-06-30. These supply the social-network substrate, trusted-relationship gating, and attention-prioritized "awareness of activity" notifications respectively. US 2007/0005754 is underrated here: "triaging attention for providing awareness of activity" is the notification-filtering concept in claim 1 step (e).

(B) Pre-priority family-cited references (from "Family Cites Families (46)"):

1. US 6,681,369 (Xerox) — see above.
2. US 7,669,123 B2 — Facebook (Zuckerberg et al.), "Dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a social network," priority 2005-12-14, filed 2006-08-11, issued 2010-02-23. (link) Before this patent's priority date, therefore available under § 102(e). Its own background states the problem and solution in terms that read like a rewrite of the claims here: "Social networking offers users the opportunity for frequent, automatic notification of changes in the information posted by other users. In other words, rather than having to initiate calls or emails to learn news of another user, a user… may passively receive alerts to new postings by other users"; a news feed is "automatically generated," and the list of activities "may be filtered, for example, according to priority settings of the viewing user and/or privacy setting of the subject user," with news items containing "links to media content" and links enabling the viewing user to participate. That is claim 1 steps (d)(e) — preference-filtered notification of another user's updates, delivered with an activatable link.
3. US 7,353,894 (Google), "Methods and systems for requesting and providing information in a social network," 2004-06-30, and US 7,613,769 B1 (Google), "Methods and systems for providing blog information associated with a member of a social network," 2004-09-30. The latter is directly on point for ingesting blog content into a social-network member's presence.
4. US 7,269,590 (Yahoo!), "Method and system for customizing views of information associated with a social network user," 2004-01-29 — per-viewer customization of what a viewer sees about another user. Directly supports "tracking preferences of… second users."
5. US 2005/0283753 A1 — Denise Ho, "Alert triggers and event management in a relationship system," 2003-08-07 — alert-trigger/event-management infrastructure in a relationship (social) system. Excellent secondary reference for the "communicating to the second user that the profile page… has been updated" step.
6. Red Hat open-overlay family — US 7,792,903 (identity management), US 8,615,550 (client-side data scraping), US 8,612,483 (link swarming), US 8,185,584 (activity history management), all filed 2006-05-31, plus the open-overlay application published as US 2007/0282877 A1. (US 7,792,903) Confirmed by search: the open overlay service interfaces external services 104 including MySpace and Friendster, maintains user database 210 with "periodicity of notifications, email addresses, format of the information," and uses client-side data scraping as messaging server 204 "evaluates the response and determines if a notification event is needed." The activity-history application describes "passively tracked and logged" activity "formatted into a viewable form, such as a web site or web log." This is the external-content-aggregation-into-one-social-context concept, one month before the priority date, with per-user notification settings. Note: these are § 102(e) art only as to their US filings/published applications; the applications published in Dec. 2007, so their publication dates are not prior art — the filing date is what makes them § 102(e) art.
7. US 2006/0184617 A1 — Nicholas, "Method and system for the creating, managing, and delivery of feed formatted content," 2005-02-11; US 2007/0011665 A1 — Microsoft, "Content syndication platform," 2005-06-21; US 2007/0038712 A1 — Microsoft, "Acquisition of syndication feed items via an information workflow application," 2005-08-15. These three are the RSS/syndication ingestion layer — feed creation, acquisition, and delivery. They collectively establish that pulling third-party feed content into a server-side application was conventional.
8. US 2007/0094389 A1 — Nussey, "Provision of RSS feeds based on classification of content," 2005-10-23, and US 2007/0100960 A1 — Yahoo!, "Managing content for RSS alerts over a network," 2005-10-28. These are the bridge between bucket (B) 12 and claim 1 step (e): feed content classified by type, and alerts delivered over RSS on a managed schedule. "RSS alerts" is literally the specification's own notification mechanism (FIG. 3's output processing 340 → e-mail 342 / web page 344 / RSS feed 346).
9. US 8,166,061 (AOL), "Searching recent content publication activity," 2006-01-10; US 7,685,198 (Yahoo!), collaborative tag suggestions, 2006-01-25; US 8,046,411 (Yahoo!), multimedia sharing in social networks for mobile devices, 2006-04-28; US 8,175,128 (Facebook), "Communicating a newsfeed of media content based on a member's interactions in a social network environment," 2006-08-11. All pre-priority; all confirm that aggregating and surfacing media content in a social context was well-trodden by mid-2006.

(C) Applicant's admitted prior art (Background, "Description of the Related Art"):

1. onxiam — the specification states: "The web site, onxiam, permits a user to consolidate all of his or her online identities in a single location and present them as hyperlinks on a web page that can be made accessible to anyone who wants to learn about the user's multiple online identities." My search confirmed the product concept: (killerstartups), (Genbeta, ES), (jeffc.me review) — user enters usernames for external services (Flickr, YouTube, MySpace, blogs, Xbox Live…), can mark each public or private, and gets a single page linking out to all identities.
2. Yahoo! 360° — the specification states: "In Yahoo! 360°, users maintain a personal web site through which they can maintain a blog, share their photos using a feed from Flickr, present profile information, subscribe to external feeds, and see which friends are currently online."
3. RSS/Atom/SOAP feeds and web crawling — the specification: "Other types of web feeds may be employed… Some of these examples include atom feeds and feeds based on the SOAP protocol. It may even be possible to crawl the web pages of the third party web sites to collect the relevant information and store any updates in the cache storage unit."

Caveat on bucket C: the dates of the onxiam and Yahoo! 360° disclosures need verification. My searches returned an onxiam review site dated 2007 and a developer blog whose last post was 2006-10-31, which suggests onxiam's public availability may straddle the critical date. A Yahoo! 360°-specific launch date I did not verify. Treat bucket C as applicant-admitted prior art — an admission in the specification is competent evidence of what was known, but for a § 102(b) printed-publication theory you must prove the dates. For a § 103 obviousness theory, the admission is highly persuasive regardless, because it concedes the concept and the problem.

4. Element-by-element mapping of claim 1

Result: every element of claim 1, read in the alternative where the claim permits it, is disclosed across this small, same-field set. There is no missing element.

5. The specific combinations, and why a PHOSITA would have made them

Combination A (strongest): Yahoo! 360° + Xerox US 6,681,369 + US 7,669,123

Rationale. Yahoo! 360° (admitted, same field) already did the hard architectural thing: a social profile page that renders external content via feeds (Flickr). Xerox '369 (same field — community information sharing) already did the notification thing: per-user registration of sources to watch + change detection + type-aware notification to a community of users. US 7,669,123 (same field — social networking) already did the delivery thing: automatically generated, viewer-preference-filtered alerts about other users' activity, carrying links. Combine and you get claim 1.

KSR rationales:

• Combination of familiar elements, each performing its known function — feed ingestion, change detection, preference filtering, and link notification are each independently known; the combination yields no more than the sum of the parts.
• Known problem, known solution, finite predictable options — the patent's own Background supplies the problem statement verbatim: "the process of browsing the content of other users has become highly inefficient," and "individuals maintain their content under multiple profiles and it is becoming increasingly difficult to share them efficiently with others." Having identified the goal, a PHOSITA faces only the mechanical question of whether to notify by e-mail, web page, or RSS — which the specification itself lists as a design choice.
• Market/competitive pressure — the patent's own record establishes a dense cluster of contemporaneous actors (Yahoo!, Google, Red Hat, Microsoft, Facebook, onxiam, Friendster) building exactly this. Where "market demand… create[s] a strong incentive to solve the problem, and that there are a finite number of identified, predictable solutions," the combination is obvious as a matter of law under KSR.
• Design incentive / predictable improvement — adding a change-notification layer to an existing aggregation page is an obvious enhancement to the aggregation page's utility; no reference teaches away.

Anticipated counter-argument and rebuttal. The patentee will argue that Yahoo! 360°/onxiam push the user to the external site (hyperlinks) while claim 1 pulls content into the social-network profile. Two answers: (i) Yahoo! 360°'s Flickr feed is a pull, and Morgenstern '801 explicitly disparages mere linking ("requires clicking a link for access") and teaches server-side incorporation of another's content; (ii) claim 10/20 expressly cover the link alternative — "adding or updating… an activatable link to the content on the profile page" — which collapses the distinction entirely.

Combination B: US 2005/0203801 (Morgenstern) + US 2005/0283753 (Ho) + US 6,681,369 (Xerox)

Why: Morgenstern '801 places the content-collection premise inside social networks and affinity groups and provides the itemType metadata that gives "types of content" a concrete antecedent. Ho '753 provides relationship-system alert triggers/event management. Xerox '369 provides the registration + change-type notification. Motivation: extend a content-collection system's reach by alerting associates when collected content changes — a routine, economically motivated extension. Same reference family, same field, no teaching away.

Combination C: US 7,613,769 (Google, blogs of social-network members) + US 2006/0184617 (Nicholas, feed-formatted content) + US 2007/0100960 (Yahoo!, RSS alerts) + US 7,269,590 (Yahoo!, customized views)

Why: This combination is essentially a recipe for the specification's FIG. 6 embodiment as claimed in claims 4–6/14–16 — the blog-in-profile section. '769 supplies the blog-in-social-network plumbing; Nicholas supplies feed formatting; Yahoo!'s RSS-alert reference supplies both the delivery channel and the "managed" scheduling that the specification describes as caching with min/max lifetimes; '590 supplies per-viewer customization. Motivation: RSS adoption and the growth of blogging created an express, documented desire to syndicate blog content into social profiles — the specification's own Background narrates this trend as the problem to be solved.

Combination D: Red Hat open overlay (US 7,792,903 + US 8,615,550 + US 8,185,584) + US 7,669,123 + US 6,681,369

Why: The Red Hat family is a near-complete external-aggregation system: identities across MySpace/Friendster mapped into one profile, client-side scraping of external services where direct interfaces are blocked, user database with notification periodicity/format settings, notification-event determination, and passive activity logging "formatted into a viewable form, such as a web site or web log." Add the Facebook news-feed's preference-filtered, link-bearing alert and Xerox's registration/change-type model, and claim 1 is met. Motivation: Red Hat's own specification states the goal — "it can be difficult for users to maintain their multiplicity of accounts for their social networks" — the same problem statement as this patent's Background, one and the same solution space.

6. Dependent claims

Net assessment on dependents: claims 2–10/12–20 add no non-obvious subject matter; several of them (3/13, 8/18; 10/20) broaden the claim into squarely-anticipated territory.

7. Claim 11 (system)

Claim 11 mirrors claim 1 as "one or more processors" + "a memory coupled to the processors comprising instructions executable by the processors." Under Alice step two and the § 103 analysis alike, this recites generic computer hardware programmed to perform the identical five-step sequence. Every reference above discloses a server with a database and processing logic (Xerox '369's "system… comprising" claim 1; Red Hat's application server 202 + user database 210; Morgenstern's GBSS 1.3 with server-side scripting engine and MySQL database). Claim 11 rises and falls with claim 1 and is, if anything, more vulnerable, because the hardware recitation adds nothing to the prior-art systems that already had processors and memory.

8. Secondary considerations (Graham factor 4) — nothing on this record

I found no evidence of objective indicia in the materials available:

• No unexpected results. The specification asserts four advantages in the Summary — central access, no need to re-browse, user-defined filters, selectable notification methods/frequency — every one of which is a direct, predicted consequence of combining the references. Each maps 1:1 onto an admitted prior-art feature (onxiam's central location; Xerox's registration-to-be-notified; Yahoo!'s feed subscriptions) or a reference feature (Nussey's classification; Yahoo!'s RSS alerts).
• No long-felt but unmet need. The opposite: the Background concedes that onxiam and Yahoo! 360° had already partially met the need, and characterizes the remaining problem as merely that browsing "has become highly inefficient" — a crowding/ergonomics observation, not an unmet technical need.
• No nexus. Any commercial success in social networking in 2006–2011 is attributable to network effects, not to the claimed feed-ingestion architecture.
• No teaching away. None of the references criticizes the combination. Morgenstern '801's criticism of link-only sharing actively points toward the claimed pull-and-render approach.

9. Flags, caveats, and things I could not verify

1. The claims on the Google Patents page are drafted in AIA-era style ("by one or more computer systems of an online social network"), and the description repeatedly says "landing page" while the claims say "profile page." I could not verify whether these are the as-granted 2011 claims or post-grant amendments (e.g., via a certificate of correction or a reexamination certificate). Google Patents does not list a reexamination in the "Status" or family sections. Verify the operative claim text against USPTO PatentCenter before relying on this analysis for any adversarial purpose. If the as-issued claims differ, the mapping in § 4 must be re-run.
2. The US 7,669,123 reexamination. A third-party comment on IPWatchdog (2012) states that an ex parte reexamination of US 7,669,123 was ordered by the USPTO on 2012-06-27, with WO 2007/052285 (Rathod, "Universal knowledge management and desktop search system") cited as art. (IPWatchdog) This is an unverified third-party report and I did not confirm the outcome of any reexamination. It matters because if the US 7,669,123 claims were cancelled or narrowed, its disclosure remains prior art (a reference's disclosure is prior art even if its claims fall), but its persuasiveness as "what Facebook itself thought was patentable" changes. Verify via the USPTO reexamination record.
3. Morgenstern's assignee in the record shown is Buy.com, Inc. (per the WO publication I retrieved) — the Google Patents entry for US 2005/0203801 does not show an assignee in the material you supplied. Also note the related Morgenstern patent "Method and apparatus for constructing a networking database and system" in the same inventor's portfolio. Do not conflate the two.
4. The dates of the onxiam and Yahoo! 360° admissions are unverified (see § 3(C)). For an obviousness theory, this is a minor gap because the admissions are in the patent's own specification; for any § 102 theory, it is fatal until proven.
5. Same-family documents are not prior art. US 2008/0065701 (Lindstrom) and US 9,798,789 share this patent's priority date (2006-09-12) and inventive entity, so they cannot be used against claim 1. Do not chart them. The exceptions are the CIP-only claims, where the priority question in § 1 above matters — but even then, the parent is the same family and is disqualified under § 102(a)'s "by others" requirement for the shared disclosure.
6. US 7,958,193 and US 2010/0318925 (Microsoft) are not prior art — reiterating § 2 because they are the most likely references to be mis-cited against this patent.

10. Bottom line

Claim 1 and claim 11 are, in my assessment, obvious under § 103. The invention is the combination of two well-documented, same-field practices as of September 2006 — (i) syndicating a user's external content (blog, photos, video) onto a social-network profile via web feeds, and (ii) preference-filtered, link-bearing notification to other users about a tracked user's activity — neither of which the applicant claims to have invented, and one of which (i) the applicant itself conceded in the Background by naming onxiam and Yahoo! 360°. This is a textbook KSR case: familiar elements, known functions, predictable result, a finite set of implementation options, and a problem the applicant openly acknowledged was already recognized in the industry. No secondary considerations appear on this record to rebut that conclusion.

The strongest single-reference pair for a claim chart is Xerox US 6,681,369 (notification/registration/change-type) + US 7,669,123 (social-network preference-filtered link-bearing feed), with Yahoo! 360°/onxiam as the admitted-prior-art bridge for the external-content-into-profile step, and Morgenstern US 2005/0203801 supplying the social-network content-collection and itemType elements. Add Red Hat US 7,792,903 for claim 3/13 and 8/18 (stored third-party credentials), and the Nicholas/Microsoft/Nussey/Yahoo! RSS-alert group for claims 4–6/14–16.

Would you like me to convert this into a formal two-reference claim chart (with element-by-element quote-and-cite rows) or a set of invalidity contentions formatted for service?