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Comment by roc | Hacker News Reader

The independent claims all explicitly codify the follower/following mechanic. So if you want to show prior art, you'll have to find something where a user was subscribing to receive broadcast messages from other explicitly-defined users, as opposed to subscribing to a channel, group, mailing list, etc.

The heaps of similar methods that don't include follower/following is a good reminder of how easy it is to avoid infringing on this patent: just skip the follower/following mechanic.

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afaik, LiveJournal (i.e., Brad Fitzpatrick) invented the follower/following pattern, except they just called it "friends of" & "friends".

LJ was the direct inspiration for Twitter, at least according to this interview: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/02/twitter-c...

Friends is bi-directional, no?

Or did LiveJournal have a way for me to be your friend without you being mine?

> Friends is bi-directional, no?

Not in Livejournal lingo - remember, this is pre-Facebook.

Livejournal's 'friend' and 'friend of' worked exactly the same as Twitter's 'following' and 'followers'.

That would seem to be prior art for that element then, depending on the dates. Though now we'd have to dig into the rest of the elements.

And apparently I'm getting downvoted for not being familiar with LiveJournal, so that's something someone else would have to do.

Isn't h2g2 significantly older than Livejournal? They've had non-bi-directional friendships for years (and you're automatically subscribed to your friends' journals (blogs)).

Do the users have to be human? Because I'd have thought most Observer pattern implementations fit the concept of "follower" / "followee".

That's a solid question. I don't know.

I would be tempted to say that automated agents would obviously be prior art, but inventions that just automate long-standing physical workflows in a straightforward way (do it on a computer) have been found patentable more than a few times.

So I wouldn't be optimistic that the reverse isn't also true.

can you patent a design pattern ?

I'm not a patent lawyer or anything, but I don't think that is the important part. It looks to me like what they're really looking to patent is cross-media communication — Bob submits a tweet via the website, Chris gets it texted to his phone and Danielle sees it pop up via Growl notification from her client app.

LiveJournal doesn't route messages. It performs database queries which renders to HTML. As a result twitter will broadcast what you say to all of your followers, immediately, to their cell phones. This isn't something LiveJournal's architecture supported.

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