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.

Isn't this the same idea?

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

Yours and a thousand others! So many people have thought of The Like Button For the Interwebs. This is why ideas alone are pretty much useless...

I started implementing this idea a couple months ago. Http://faveheart.appspot.com

Still no 'dislike' button.

I dunno about how much of this is common knowledge by now, but Facebook has a good (albeit manipulative-feeling) reason to not have a dislike button: Facebook is engineered to be a purely positive experience.

Here is a quick article about it: http://anotherlab.rajapet.net/2009/06/facebook-does-not-need...

But being collectively negative can be a positive experience. Obviously Facebook has never met Goth culture.

being collectively negative often means being exclusive and closed minded, which aren't necessarily negative in themselves, but over time i do think it hurts the collective participants, just as any non-thinking joiner activity can. disliking something, which often leads to not doing it, limit's a person's growth, and is thus more hurtful than liking something, which often leads to doing it, which can sometimes lead to thoughtful evaluation (though perhaps experience itself is what's important, not even judgments at all).

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

[Unlike] is not [Dislike].

Your sentence hurts my head. Can you please explain what you just said?

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).

Scoble seems to be thinking about this problem:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1220266

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

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

The average rating system is horribly broken: http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2009/09/five-stars-domina...

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.

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.

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.

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

Can you elaborate?

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.

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.

here is one of the coolest FB connect promotions I've seen yet: http://www.imheremovie.com/

It's not just the trailer either, it's the whole movie, but checkout the experience, and hopefully you have some people you don't mind inviting, because that actually enhances it.

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?

Facebook is a social news site.

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.

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