Twitter Patents Twitter

Twitter has been granted a patent which describes the basic principles of the service itself.

Originally filed in July 2008 and granted to Jack Dorsey and Christopher Isaac Stone, the patent describes a system for "device-independent point to multipoint communication."

From the patent: "The system is configured to receive a message addressed to one or more destination users (...) The system applies rules to the message based on destination user information to determine the message endpoints, the message endpoints being, for example, Short Message Service (SMS), Instant Messaging (IM), E-mail, web page output, or Application Program Interface (API) function call."