Facebook patents, July 2012.

	PAT. NO.		Title
1	8,230,046		Setting cookies in conjunction with phased delivery of structured documents
2	8,225,376		Dynamically generating a privacy summary
3	8,224,716		Methods and systems for facilitating the provision of opinions to a shopper from a panel of peers
4	8,219,562		Efficient storage and retrieval for large number of data objects
5	8,219,500		System and method for managing information flow between members of an online social network
6	8,214,457		Post-to-profile control
7	8,213,924		Providing distributed online services for mobile devices

#5 on the list looks most interesting. The original patent application was filed in May, 2004!
It's a good illustration that, in system terms, Facebook represents an instance of Distribution and Control.


tags: patent, facebook, example, social, networking, distribution, control