Do you want a wish list? For shopping or for Santa Claus? Sorry, you have to pay to Microsoft for it!

In accordance with Techdirt, Microdoft just got the patent for the “wish list”.

In the US Patent dated January 1, 2008, the wish list is defined as “an electronic item list system and method, such as a wish or gift list, for an electronic shopping mall/online shopping portal, or an item list system provided as a software service. The system and method provides a user with the ability to create a list of items that the user would like others to purchase for the user as a gift or as a list of items that the user would like to retain for a later purchase. A user interface is provided that allows the user to select items electronically to add to a user specific gift list. The items are not limited to specific products, but can include general product categories and/or products from a specific merchant or manufacturer. The user interface communicates through an interface component that extracts data from a number of databases. For example, the databases can include a merchant database, an offers database, a manufacturers database and a products database. The interface will extract data from one or all of the databases based on the amount of information in a gift list request and provide the best results. As records are removed from the databases, the interface allows for graceful degradation of the display, such that something is always displayed to the user.”

The “Inventors” of the wish list are Martineau; Teresa (Kirkland, WA), and Blinn; Arnold N. (Bellevue, WA), and the assignee is Microsoft Corporation (Redmond, WA) .

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 3rd, 2008 at 12:26 pm and is filed under Business, Companies, Intellectual Proprietary Rights, Microsoft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.