• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, July 30, 2012

Search marketers are familiar with customizing Web pages and granting permissions to create a personal experience. Identifying the site visitor before she arrives allows the brand to serve up custom content and build a closer relationship.

Apparently, Facebook wants to do the same. The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) granted Facebook a series of patents in July for everything from storing large amounts of data objects in secondary files -- which would enable the company to store more information in less space -- to using cookies to support and save permissions and settings.

Along with section ID, SEO by the Sea founder Bill Slawski said cookies can allow the site to save settings as members go from one page to another in the social network. The broad patent explains how Web pages contain various embedded resources like data records or more complex digitally encoded multimedia content like software programs or other code objects, graphics, images, audio signals, and videos.

The nuances that make this patent unique are not apparent, Slawski said.

The USPTO also granted Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg his first patent application approval. Zuckerberg's first patent, written along with co-author Chris Kelly's, explains a "system and method for dynamically generating a privacy summary." The six-year old patent application describes how a profile for a user is generated.

The patent reads: "One or more privacy setting selections are received from the user associated with the profile. The profile associated with the user is updated to incorporate the one or more privacy setting selections. A privacy summary is then generated for the profile based on the one or more privacy setting selections."