Facebook is still a social network for college students only

When Facebook was still a social network for college students in 2006, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, 22 years old, applied for a patent on Internet privacy settings (Zuckerberg). Last week, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office finally approved the patent application.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has rejected Zuckerberg's patent application. The patent describes a technology that "dynamically generates a privacy summary," invented by Chris Kelly Zuckerberg and former Facebook executive Chris Kelly. Kelly, who served as Facebook's chief privacy officer, resigned from Facebook in 2009.

Public records show that the patent describes a way to get the user's personal information and choose different privacy options. This is the same way that current Facebook users share or hide certain information, such as e-mail addresses for different contacts. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office initially refused to recognize the patent and repeatedly dismissed the patent application.

The records show that in April this year, Facebook legal advisers and patent auditors spoke on the phone. This June, the United States Patent and Trademark Office said the patent application will be approved in July. Such a situation is not uncommon in patent applications, and a Facebook spokeswoman declined to comment on the news.

The patent is not the first one that Zuckerberg won. Public records show that Zuckerberg is the inventor of 8 U.S. patents. Facebook has recently stepped up its patent library to deal with possible patent disputes. Facebook has 774 U.S. patents and 546 patent applications by March, the company said in its IPO document. Facebook is likely to update the figures when it publishes its quarterly earnings in Thursday.

Another of Mr Zuckerberg's patents has been used in patent lawsuits against Facebook and Yahoo. Yahoo has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Facebook and Facebook has launched a counterclaim. But two companies have reached a settlement on patent disputes.

This April, Facebook said it would pay 550 million of billions of dollars to Microsoft to get some of the patents that Microsoft recently acquired from AOL.