Yahoo! Inc.

Google Inc.

Eric Marcoullier

John Sampson

Todd Sampson

Steve Ho

Neil Scott Rafer

A system and method are directed towards enabling centralized registration for managing a selective display of visitor information to distributed social networking websites. A visitor may enter selective personal information, and determine what information is made available on a social networking webpage. The visitor may then return to the social networking website to view selective visitor information, such as within a reader roll. A visitor to a social networking website may select to not have their information displayed at selective a social networking website, while still being displayed at another social networking website. In one embodiment, selecting to not display their information may be performed by 'mousing' over their information and selecting a display option. Social networking websites may look to a centralized registration system to determine whether to display the visitor information, while still being able to obtain information about the visitor, and/or provide benefits to the visitor.

Centralized registration for distributed social content services

Embodiments of the invention are directed to identifying network resources or other topics that are of interest to members of multiple online communities to which a user belongs. Online communities include blogs, websites, games, e-commerce systems, messaging systems, wikis, etc. For each online community, click activity or other client behaviors are tracked and analyzed to determine statistical metrics about community activity, such as which articles, links, services, or other network resources are popular in the online community. At least some of the tracking or analysis can be performed by clients that access the online communities, by a server of each online community, and/or by a central tracking system. The results for each community may be further analyzed relative to each other. The results are provided for all communities with which a given user is associated. For example, a list of the most popular links in the user's selected online communities.

Hot within my communities

A system and method are directed towards enabling control of widgets using on-widget data controls. A visitor may enter selective personal information and determine what information is made available on a social networking webpage. A visitor to a social networking website may select to not have their information displayed at a social networking website, while still being displayed at another social networking website. A visitor's information may be displayed within a reader roll, an association listing, a visitor comment page, or the like. An owner of a social networking website may also select not to have a visitor's information displayed on the website. In one embodiment, selecting not to display information may be performed by 'mousing' over the information and selecting a display option. Social networking websites may look to a centralized registration system to determine whether to display the visitor information.

On-widget data control

Rendering a contributor representation, such as an avatar, near content such as a comment, contributed to a web page such as a blog. The contributor representation is associated with a contributor identifier, such as an email address, and stored at a centralized registrar. The centralized registrar provides a content service with an initial script to include in the web page along with the contributor identifier. A requesting client runs the initial script, which requests an additional script from the centralized registrar. The additional script can track user actions and analyzes the DOM of the web page for an attribute associated with the contributor identifier and contributed content. Based on a location of the attribute in the DOM, the additional script also determines a location in the web page to insert the contributor representation. The additional script then requests and inserts the contributor representation to be rendered near the contributed content.

Growing community of inventors

San Francisco, CA, United States of America

Eric Marcoullier