Can Facebook get any bigger? The F8 developer event on Wednesday will reveal a Facebook 'like' button that will expand the existing sharing options between Facebook and the rest of the web, reports the New York Times.
The existing share button will add a favourite link to a user's profile, but the new 'like' feature makes that much more substantial, allowing publishers to offer a wider range of social sharing tools and giving Facebook more data and what is being shared and who by.
Photo by recursion_see_recursion on Flickr. Some rights reserved
In return, publishers get access to some of that information to contextualise information on that page - so rather than listing the most read articles on its site, the like feature could show which articles the reader's friends had recommended.
An additional toolbar powered by Facebook Connect will let developers add more Facebook features at the bottom of pages, so users can log in the 'satellite' sites with their Facebook ID.
This strategy is about making Facebook accessible is as many places to as many people as possible, trying to keep Facebook at the centre of the real-time discussion. The target is Twitter, particularly following Twitter's recent @anywhere developments that allow Twitter functions to be embedded on any websites.
Meanwhile Meebo, allied with Microsoft and Yahoo, is today launching a rival toolbar that will invite users to chat, posts links and share content including photos. Meebo says the technology will eventually be run by a non-profit group.
That solution will appeal to those that believe behavioural data should not be owned or locked into one proprietary network, like Facebook and Apple. But that ethic might not even have occurred to the majority of the 400 million monthly users of Facebook, for whom functionality and simply using the same network as most of their friends is the deciding factor.
source : http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2010/apr/19/facebook-f8
The existing share button will add a favourite link to a user's profile, but the new 'like' feature makes that much more substantial, allowing publishers to offer a wider range of social sharing tools and giving Facebook more data and what is being shared and who by.
Photo by recursion_see_recursion on Flickr. Some rights reserved
In return, publishers get access to some of that information to contextualise information on that page - so rather than listing the most read articles on its site, the like feature could show which articles the reader's friends had recommended.
An additional toolbar powered by Facebook Connect will let developers add more Facebook features at the bottom of pages, so users can log in the 'satellite' sites with their Facebook ID.
This strategy is about making Facebook accessible is as many places to as many people as possible, trying to keep Facebook at the centre of the real-time discussion. The target is Twitter, particularly following Twitter's recent @anywhere developments that allow Twitter functions to be embedded on any websites.
Meanwhile Meebo, allied with Microsoft and Yahoo, is today launching a rival toolbar that will invite users to chat, posts links and share content including photos. Meebo says the technology will eventually be run by a non-profit group.
That solution will appeal to those that believe behavioural data should not be owned or locked into one proprietary network, like Facebook and Apple. But that ethic might not even have occurred to the majority of the 400 million monthly users of Facebook, for whom functionality and simply using the same network as most of their friends is the deciding factor.
source : http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2010/apr/19/facebook-f8