A patent is a set of exclusive rights granted by a state (national government) to an inventor or their assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for a public disclosure of an invention.

Typically a patent application must include one or more claims defining the invention which must be new, non-obvious, and useful or industrially applicable.

Source Wikipedia

Patents have been around for a while and in my view it is a way to protect an Inventor’s idea from being stolen by a multi-national company and bringing it to the market. But over time the concept of Patents should get a big overhaul on the research and granting part, because the social media creates a whole new meaning of something getting publicized and thus out in the open.

Is my idea new or not?!
When attending a Patent searching workshop myself, it became clear to me that applicants of patents do everything in their power to prevent anyone of finding their patent. They accomplish this by use of synonyms and different ways of describing a definition of their application, making it a hard job to find out if something is new or not. The workshop leader also specifically noted that when an applicant applies for a patent, the search for it being new has a guarantee to the door as we dutch would say this. Meaning that they actually give almost no guarantee that a thing is new, because of this approach of making things hard to find.

Complicating things or vice versa?!
So when you’re adding social media (or even blogs or other stuff on the WWW) to the equation, is finding out if something is new getting easier or is the big noise of the social media stream too big to filter that out? I believe this is also one of the constructs behind being open source, that something that is known widely and is being developed by a community is not granted a patent. So getting your idea out in the open would be the best thing to do…or is it? I think this all depends on what your plan is and if you have ideas to market your idea or not. But be ware that when pitching your idea at a company, that they might respond with a “Nah, we’re not interested in such an idea.”, only to find out that exactly your idea has been marketed by the same company you pitched it to. So before pitching, I would decide between publicly known or patent beforehand!

Is Social media a legal tool for granting application or not?
Another question arises when you are checking for new ideas. Once an idea has been publicly available, it cannot be patented. Or at least one has to really narrow definitions down to some specific area or field and use combinations where it does make it a new thing. So the question is; “When someone spits out an idea into the social media stream, is it preventing a new idea for patent application of being granted or not? This is a question that needs to be answered in the overhaul for the concept of patenting.

The other side of the social media being a legal factor or not might be the ability to search through all the clutter… As I could think of the example where I can find back my first tweet, but searching for that exact tweet is impossible.

So a lot is unknown on how the new ways of communication are effecting the patent-business. But hopefully there will get some stories into the media, where a social network’s message or status is used to claim an idea being new or not. And if you yourself have something to share on this topic feel free to drop it in the comments.

Bottom-up
The way this works is that you want to reach the people interested in your specific disciplines/topics. So you’ll have to start at that level to let those people find your specific website/blog. If people are generally interested in the way you bring the news, they’ll start searching for your name and not the specific brand name. On the website or blog about yourself, you redirect people further to the topics you’re also writing about. In my opinion this way of working attracts the people you do want to have as followers, because they’re genuinely interested in the stuff you write.

Top-down
The reason why I dislike the Top-down way of working, is that people should not be pushed into following all that you do, share, post,etc. Your own stream of news, interests, shared items, posts and other stuff, might look cluttered to people who are only interested in one of the topics you write about. So offering them the option to find your sub-topics in a place of their own, leaves the choice to the reader.

What are your thoughts on this topic? Please share it in the comments…

• How do I want to utilize it?
• How can I let it work for me?
• What do I want to achieve by using this technology?

How to utilize
As twitter, friendfeed and Google friend connect – and many of the other technologies – feature a user interface, they also open up their API for programmers to create interfaces to optimize the way you can work with these technologies. For me this was my first journey into utilizing the technologies for me. Over time I’ve found a few clients to use within iGoogle, Windows Mobile phone and desktop. The ones I go by at the moment, which optimize my usage for the technologies are: Twittergadget for iGoogle, Twikini for Windows Mobile and Twhirl for desktop.

As I’m almost getting my Android phone, I’ll be swapping the twikini – which now costs money to use – for twidroid.

How do I get it to work for me
The people who are also using the new technologies, form a great stream of interesting and non-interesting topics and items. I described in an earlier post, that it’s important to filter these streams into a custom stream which I find interesting. This is also how I let Twitter work for me. I handpick every user I follow and see if they post interesting tweets before adding them. When somebody is tweeting a tat bit too much to my liking I’ll most probably remove them from my list, as they’re cluttering the overall customized stream of things I do want to know about.

I’d like to see Google’s Friend connect more like a community builder, through which people can stay in touch, comment on and generally a central communication method. I setup the connect bar and widget’s up for people to join my site and leave their thoughts through that system.

Friendfeed on the other hand is a tool, which you can utilize in many different ways. It could be that I’d use it to search for the latest technologies people are talking about, or I’d like to find other people in the same area and follow their topics in friendfeed. On the other end, I’d rather have it working  for me, as my time is limited and I don’t want to get consumed into the stream of friendfeed posts, likes and comments. the way I let it work for me, is to utilize it as a aggregator of all different items that I find, share, create, write, blog, etc… And put it in  a single place called friendfeed, then it becomes a powerful database of information of which I know I can refer to or call on, when I want to find that one item again. This might not be the way friendfeed wants me to fully use it, but I let it work for me in this way, so it works for me.

What do I want to achieve
Well staying up-to-date in the ever faster changing Internet world is important for me, these technologies make it possible for me to do that. Although I had to find my way with them, there always seems to be someone out there like me who put in the features I like. That way I’m able to fully utilize the technologies and let me operate at my full potential in finding my way around and communicating it with others who are interested in that kind of information as well. If there ain’t a technology for it yet, they always turn up after others have felt the need for it as well. The things you can achieve with todays technologies, were far fetched in the time I started using web-related technologies, but here they are so “Use them” -  Just do it!

1. possessing the claimed or attributed character, quality, or origin; not counterfeit; authentic; real
2. free from pretense, affectation, or hypocrisy; sincere

As it’s quite hard to distinguish yourself from the rest these days and it’s getting harder to stand out of the crowd, it’s likely you get tempted to look into the “10 ways to…” articles that are all over the net. For example; articles that show you how to increase your twitter followers. Really good to see there are ways to get people started into using a service and they should use it. Most of the articles I read tell me that the way I’m currently using services is about 75% the way it’s supposed to be used. But do I really want all those people following me just to follow me because they’re taught to follow and have a huge follow list and so giving me a large follow list, or do I want the people who are interested in what I’m genuinely posting and sharing…

The most important thing about my online presence is that it has to be genuine. This is where I start questioning myself to get into these ways to increase and be heard, because my feeling tells me I’m about to leave my authenticity behind. Maybe it’s a noble cause to hope that people start to notice you because you’re being genuine, but for me it certainly is the way!

Which brings me to the next questions; what will I be sharing? What am I posting about? What are my passions and interests and can they be packed into one blog? It’s time to answer these things by just doing what I feel is right. It’s time to let go of the thinking (just a bit) and start sharing more and not keep myself occupied with thoughts all the time, because living in thoughts doesn’t share my view of things.

Of course I make use of a few other social networking tools, which reside in the cloud, i.e. LinkedIn.com. Through such a networking site it is easy to stay in touch with people you worked with, (ex)colleagues, classmates, etc. mainly focused on a professional level. Connecting on LinkedIn however is not quite the same as connecting on a social networking event, but the outcome at an event can be much higher than with only connecting with a former colleague or future business partner. Due to the fact that face to face meetings make a bigger impression, putting the positive or negative impression aside.

Remember your days at school where you had to present for the first time and the feeling of a whole classroom listening to you, was taking your breathe away… Compared to presenting this is more about approaching, connecting and trying to find a level of interest to get the conversation started, but I’m looking to improve this part of me. I know a few of my unexplored areas and I’m willing to improve this. I will continue to improve myself for these events and in the near future I will visit another similar event, hopefully more focused on social networking for professionals.

I think that just like with presenting for the 1st time, it starts with:  Just do it!