

Facebook ‘Like’ Button Takes Over Share Button Functionality - thankuz
http://mashable.com/2011/02/27/facebook-like-button-takes-over-share-button-functionality/

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zach
Is there any way for people to share a URL with their friends on Facebook
without affecting a globally-visible count?

I have a real-estate site and homebuyers have an incentive not to "tip off"
anyone else who could end up bidding against them for a house. You can imagine
the same is true for eBay items.

But they would still like to share homes they're interested in on Facebook,
among a small network. I put a Share link on our pages instead of one that
would actually show the number of shares or likes. But of course, this
information is very publicly available (e.g. the Shareaholic shows it for
every page).

To be honest, I don't presume it makes any sense for Facebook to support this
kind of thing. They are naturally biased towards openness and would rather
provide functionality to support that. And this is kind of a unique scenario.
But on behalf of users of the personal web, I would love it if Facebook
supported:

<meta name="robots" content="nolinkcount">

~~~
dalore
Can't they just share the url the normal way? Before all these services for
sharing urls we used to just copy the url and send it via some text medium.

~~~
zach
I think if you cut and paste the URL into the status box in the normal way,
Facebook increments the share count. Maybe if you remove the link preview it
doesn't, but I haven't tested it.

I would just like users to be able to use Facebook to easily solicit opinion
about a potential home. However, if clicking through a Share/Like button or
merely pasting the URL into Facebook causes a global "this was shared" count
to go up, users are doing something they might not want to, without even
realizing it.

I could already imagine that having Shareaholic running while looking at house
listings is probably a good idea. Especially on listings for a home you're
selling!

