Technically 90 seconds is an order of magnitude more difficult than making a regular link. Not a huge hurdle, but I don't need to read any docs or go fetch embed code to make a link.

... I guess it's also because I'm using Rails, so I'm already generating links via a helper function. So I wrote another, one line helper that does the wrapping. So that initial 90 seconds is amortized over every new Like button I add, because I use like_url rather than link_to.

Also, often like buttons are used on something like stories, so you're only adding the code to one template, and now you have tons of like buttons all over.

I chose to go the other route which takes even longer. Load the XFBML version, and include the open graph meta tags.

I did the same thing that you did, wrapped it all in a like_url helper.