Facebook: Like

What is it?

The recent f8 announcement from Mark Zuckerberg signals Facebook has stepped up to the plate and assumed a responsibility long pushed upon it by its user community – The responsibility for enabling and encouraging users to extend their dialog and interactions beyond the borders of Facebook’s domain and into the web at large. It’s without doubt a very ambitious project that aims to add a social aspect into every website that wants one, and judging by the adoption so far many indeed do. Facebook likes will hopefully add a social and personal layer based on people’s interests, to every page sporting them.

Facebook’s ambitious launch – right foot first

By starting collaborations with leading online providers such as CNN, ESPN, IMDb, etc. Facebook has already gone a fair way to facilitating “liking” as a common place activity for it’s 400,000,000+ users. Zuckerberg even went so far as to predict that Facebook would hit 1 Billion likes in the first 24 hours of the service’s existence.

I say this responsibility was pushed on Facebook as their is little new at the most fundamental layer of this functionality. People have been sharing, commenting & liking each other’s links on Facebook from the very start, and a multitude of sites and services simplified sharing their links on Facebook via a myriad multitude of dedicated services, plugins, widgets etc. Even before the announcement Facebook users were sharing over 25 billion things a month, according to a stat shared by Bret Taylor – Facebook’s Platform Lead.

What can Facebook do next?

It’s impossible to predict the full extent of the effects a step like this will have on the web’s various ecosystem & the on its evolution in general however there are a few implications that seem to me to be pretty obvious already:

Facebook is now capable of providing a Digg-like front-end interface that will offer users information as to which links are currently gaining popularity. Facebook’s in depth knowledge of its users’ demographics & tastes enables it to add a further layer of data to this simple presentation & show which type of sites are gaining acknowledged popularity with which type of people.

Facebook could add suggestion features like Stumbleupon. A possible extension of the capability mentioned above would be for Facebook to start actively offering users who might be interested in this type of service suggestion for websites that they’re likely to appreciate. As mentioned above Facebook is well aware of users likes and dislikes (and pretty much everything else). Coupling this information with aggregated data regarding websites liked by other users with similar characteristics should provide for a pretty powerful recommendation engine.

Facebook can grant users bookmark storage facilities based on their “likes”. It stands to reason that an ongoing record of a users “likes” is a service many users would very much appreciate (myself included). I’m curious as to whether users would collect the same lists of like-based-bookmarks as they do on Delicious, xmarks & similar services.

How big a deal can this be?

The deeper implications of this new and exciting functionality lie in the longer term, if/when Facebook Likes become ubiquitous, and each and every page on the web supports them. the implication will be that every individual user will experience every single page online as a personalized piece of content that is intimately related to his/her preferences and social and social network, and this is quite obviously a VERY BIG DEAL indeed.

Written by Guest Blogger: Mike Darnell

Mike Darnell is the Director of Social Media at Treepodia Ltd, the leading provider of video solutions for ecommerce and online retailers.

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Tags: Corrie Davidson, facebook, Social Media

This entry was posted on Monday, April 26th, 2010 at 8:43 am and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.