US 6,269,369 · Granted 2001-07-31

The 1997 Patent That Pioneered Shareable Digital Contact Networks

Imagine a digital contact book that lives on a server and syncs across everyone you know — where you can choose exactly what info your friends see about you, and the system automatically tells them when your birthday's coming or you're traveling to their city. Amazon patented this networked contact manager back when that kind of sharing was genuinely new.

Curated and verified by the IsItPatented Editorial team

The plain-English version

What it protects

The claim covers a networked system where users store personal contact information on a central server and grant granular permissions to control which contacts can view which pieces of their data. What's protected here is the automated notification mechanism (like birthday alerts or travel updates sent via email), the matching logic that finds contacts with common group affiliations, and the ability to sync this server-side data with a user's local contact manager while respecting multi-level permission chains (contacts of contacts).

Why it matters

Filed in 1997 and granted in 2001, this patent captures an early architectural vision of social contact networks — the idea that your digital identity and relationships could be stored centrally and selectively shared. It predates modern social media's permission models by years and covers foundational mechanics that would later appear in social networks, shared calendars, and contact-discovery platforms. Amazon's ownership of this patent gave it early intellectual property over a broad class of networked relationship-management systems.

Real-world use

Any app that lets you set privacy rules on your profile, automatically notifies your contacts about your birthday or travel plans, or finds friends through mutual group memberships is touching the territory this patent mapped out.

Original USPTO abstract

A network-computer-based personal contact manager system is disclosed wherein users of networked clients maintain and update a set of user information which is stored in a relational database on a networked server. The personal contact manager system allows each user to specify on an individual basis which of their contacts are permitted to access respective datums of their user information. In some cases, and assuming permission is granted, the system will issue notifications (e.g., by e-mail) to a user's contacts when the user changes his information or when a preset event, such as a birthday, as defined by the user, is to occur. The system also allows users to find contacts based on common group affiliations and notifies users when there are coincidences in their data (e.g., travel plans, astrological compatibility). The personal contact manager system supports the retrieval of information on the contacts of contacts, assuming such as permission has been granted by the contacts and their contacts, and can also be used to synchronize the server database with a PIM database of the user and any contacts of the user whoe have the appropriate permissions.

Patent details

Publication number: US 6,269,369
Filing date: 1997-11-02
Grant date: 2001-07-31
Assignee: Amazon.Com Holdings, Inc.
Inventor(s): ROBERTSON BRIAN D.
CPC class: H04L63/0227

View original record on Google Patents →

Want to file your own patent?

If you're designing a social or networking tool with shared contact features, search for similar patents in the contact-management space using our free scanner to understand what's already locked down.

Free patentability scan