
Facebook To Release A "Like" Button For the Whole Darn Internet - aaronbrethorst
http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/25/facebook-to-release-a-like-button-for-the-whole-darn-internet/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&utm_content=Google+Reader
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johnl
Drat, they stole my idea. Once the "like" button is in place Facebook has to
do only two thing to start raking in the money. First step is to collect
profiles of Facebookers comings and goings to each button, then secondly place
ads on the "like" button sites based upon the profiles. End result: Ad
placement based upon user profiles. Deal done.

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jaytee_clone
Isn't this the same idea?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Beacon>

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SlyShy
Still no 'dislike' button.

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kajecounterhack
I've found that if you like something first, a dislike button appears
actually!

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mooism2
[Unlike] is not [Dislike].

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johnfn
Two thoughts about this.

First, this gives facebook a huge database of the Internet. Essentially, if
they wanted to release a stumbleupon equivalent, they could. Or if they wanted
to target ads even closer to your interests, they could. This makes me feel
(more) nervous about facebook.

Second, I've always been really interested in finding the best webpages on the
Internet. Unfortunately, this is another one of those metrics that conflates
popularity with quality. If we assume that X% will press the like button
(where X is different for every website), and Y people visit the site, then we
have a total number of likes = X*Y/100. But since X only goes from 1-100, it's
pretty easy to see that popularity has a much larger affect on how many likes
a site will get than how good it actually is.

Essentially, the number of likes is a meaningless statistic (except to measure
popularity).

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gojomo
Those cases where 'likes' deviate from visits/popularity, or where 'likes'
vary among certain kinds users, will be the most interesting signals.

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johnfn
True, but I feel like a rating system would be almost universally more
telling.

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aaronbrethorst
The average rating system is horribly broken: [http://youtube-
global.blogspot.com/2009/09/five-stars-domina...](http://youtube-
global.blogspot.com/2009/09/five-stars-dominate-ratings.html)

edit: to clarify, no YouTube is not "average." But the fact still remains that
allowing users to rate a piece of content on a graded scale is 5 stars of
FAIL.

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johnfn
I wouldn't be so fast to dismiss ratings. In the right community, a rating
system is really telling. Example: www.rateyourmusic.com. Great website, good
ratings, and the peak is usually atound 3-4.

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greenlblue
I don't get it. Why do people put up with this? I see the facebook connect
thing everywhere now, even in places where it doesn't make sense.

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look_lookatme
Connect, if implemented well, can be a significant traffic driver.

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chaosmachine
Can you elaborate?

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greenlblue
Like a promotional movie site. I just want to see the trailer and leave. What
is the point of logging in and then viewing the trailer? Then again I'm
probably missing the point since promotional sites are all about raising
awareness about some product so getting access to my friends list is the whole
point of the site and facebook just streamlines the process.

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look_lookatme
This is a huge deal in, say, online publishing because people will openly
share their favorite articles and comments.

Furthermore certain kinds of events can be considered "share worthy" and thus
be pushed into your friends News Feed by the site in question. Lets say you
"recommend" a trailer using the tools on the site -- this is a feature on the
site itself, but it can map quite easily to being a new feed worthy item and
if you granted the trailer site sufficient permissions when you linked up your
FB account via connect, it can push that recommendation into FB without you
actually sharing anything explicitly to facebook.

Once inside FB, this sharing of content/events can hitch a ride on the network
effect and create a fair amount of incoming traffic. College networks on
facebook are really good for this... links to goofy memes, sports articles or
political articles can really move through facebook fast.

You might have grown up using "email this article" features on sites like the
nytimes, but there are a whole lot of people out there using facebook to
accomplish the same thing now.

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chaosmachine
So now that Facebook has their own version of a "Digg This" button, should we
expect them to launch a social news site to go with it?

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revorad
Facebook is a social news site.

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paul9290
Now every site on the web needs to automatically log you into facebook like
various blogs do to really make this an even bigger deal. Though that really
annoys me, as sometimes I want to comment anonymously.

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josephd
Seconded here. User Anonymous has been the Internet's early attraction. To
show one's website ''likes'', doesn't Stumbleupon already do this?

