
Facebook’s ‘Like’ button makes me lonely - fogus
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/2010/05/23/facebooks-like-button-makes-me-lonely/
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ryanjmo
The other week we were looking into the Facebook like buttons for a client who
was thinking about installing them on their website.

The conclusion we came to was the same as this article and we calculated it
using almost the same route. For cnn if 1,000 people like a story, given that
there are 400,000,000 Facebook users and if we assume my friends visit cnn
with equal probability as other Facebook users and that I have 300 friends, we
get that their is a ~1/1000 probability that my friends like a cnn story. Sum
up over 10 major stories that day, we get that I only have a 1/100 chance of
seeing any activity at cnn.com from my friends. And this is the case for cnn,
one of the largest websites in the country; the probability of seeing any
friend activity on a smaller site will be much much lower. The numbers just
don't work out for mainstream adoption of the Facebook like button.

This does however work better on a site like yelp or pandora, where if my
friend ever liked a restaurant it will stay relevant for a longer period of
time. Still, I think that the Facebook like button will only make sense for a
few websites on the entire web (and likely not one that anyone who is reading
this is working on).

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indigoviolet
Here's where I'd guess you're wrong: "my friends visit cnn with equal
probability as other Facebook users". CNN visitors are likely to be highly
grouped, plus you can share these stories back to Facebook and with your
friends, increasing this clusteredness.

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zck
Also, consider this: you share an article with your 300 friends on Facebook,
liking it before you do. Your friends see the article, and of the first 20, 4
of them also like it. The next one of your friends will to see the article
will have at least one friend (you!) who liked it, up to five. Not bad that
way. If you're randomly browsing, of course you're going to find fewer
articles that your friends have liked -- it's random!

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cmelbye
_move across web sites and allow you to Like any page without logging in. It
set off all sorts of privacy alarms_

Why would this set off privacy alarms? It's just an iframe. It's not like the
site owner can see what's going on inside of it; they still have to follow the
cross domain rules in the browser.

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steadicat
To me it’s a privacy alert because Facebook now potentially knows every site I
visit.

I ended up adding "127.0.0.1 connect.facebook.net" to my /etc/hosts.

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cmelbye
Oh, that's very true. I hadn't realized that at first, but the original site
is probably in the Referer field... Now that I think about it, that is scary.

~~~
steadicat
Not just in the Referer field. Facebook widgets need to know which site
they're referring to, so the widget code that site owners include on their
site contains the site id.

