Microsoft attempts to patent feed processing technology

I can’t believe it. Dave Winer reports that Microsoft are rather specifically attempting to patent a system that acts and sounds rather like what Feed Digest does. All of these excerpts from the patent application are almost word for word descriptions of significant aspects of what Feed Digest does or how it operates. It also covers significant aspects of applications such as FeedBurner.

The ability of a central system to receive feeds and allow others to retrieve data related to those feeds:

[…] the platform can acquire and organize web content, and make such content available for consumption by many different types of applications. These applications may or may not necessarily understand the particular syndication format. Thus, in the implementation example, applications that do not understand the RSS format can nonetheless, through the platform, acquire and consume content, such as enclosures, acquired by the platform through an RSS feed […]

There are cases, however, when an application that uses the platform does not wish to be subscribed to a particular feed. Rather, the application just wants to use the functionality of the platform to access data from a feed. In this case, in this particular embodiment, subscriptions object 202 supports a method that allows a feed to be downloaded without subscribing to the feed. In this particular example, the application calls the method and provides it with a URL associated with the feed. The platform then utilizes the URL to fetch the data of interest to the application. In this manner, the application can acquire data associated with a feed in an adhoc fashion without ever having to subscribe to the feed.

The ability to tailor data within the system for each feed:

On the other hand, there is data that is treated as read/write data, such as the name of a particular feed. That is, the user may wish to personalize a particular feed for their particular user interface. In this case, the object model has properties that are read/write. For example, a user may wish to change the name of a feed from “New York Times” to “NYT”. In this situation, the name property may be readable and writable.

Centralized synchronization:

In the illustrated and described embodiment, feed synchronization engine 108 (FIG. 1) is responsible for downloading RSS feeds from a source. A source can comprise any suitable source for a feed, such as a web site, a feed publishing site and the like. In at least one embodiment, any suitable valid URL or resource identifier can comprise the source of a feed. The synchronization engine receives feeds and processes the various feed formats, takes care of scheduling, handles content and enclosure downloads, as well as organizes archiving activities.

Feed normalization:

In the illustrated and described embodiment, feeds are capable of being received in a number of different feed formats. By way of example and not limitation, these feed formats can include RSS 1.0, 1.1, 0.9.times., 2.0, Atom 0.3, and so on. The synchronization engine, via the feed format module, receives these feeds in the various formats, parses the format and transforms the format into a normalized format referred to as the common format.

To Amar S. Ghandi, Edward J. Praitis, Jane T. Kim, Sean O. Lyndersay, Walter V. von Kock, William Gould, Bruce A. Morgan, and Cindy Kwan.. did you really collectively invent all of this stuff? Shame on those backing this pathetic attempt to trample over technology that has, so far, not necessitated the use of software patents.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 23rd, 2006 at 12:47 pm and is filed under General, Programming, FeedDigest. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.