No, seriously. Today will go down in history as the day Facebook claimed ownership of the word “Like”.
You no longer “Become a fan” of a page on FB, you now “Like” it. But the changes don’t stop there… Not content with being the biggest destination portal in the world, Facebook has expanded to the entire web. Now you can “Like” something anywhere on the entire internet, and it will post back to your FB stream.
IMDB was the flagship website that was used to demonstrate this new functionality (every movie now has a “Like” button), shortly followed by the announcement that webmasters can implement the Facebook Like functionality on their sites right now. A number of websites have already jumped on the bandwagon, and we can expect to see many many more in the near future (Mark Zuckerberg publicly predicted over 1 billion ‘Likes’ in the first 24 hours).
Instant Personalisation
What’s the purpose of this all? Well Facebook no doubt have some large aspirations (like taking over the web), but the idea is that it will grow a graph of things you like, and therefore websites will be able to automatically customise their content to suit your tastes. So if you click like on a number of different sports sites, next time you land on a news site, it will have the sports news front and centre.
Facebook are calling this “Instant Personalisation”, and have partnered with Microsoft (among others) to offer this functionality at launch. Expect to see it coming soon to a website near you.
This is obviously the tip of the iceberg, there will be many new features rolling out of this over the coming months.
Expect a lot more news and hype surrounding this announcement over the next few days.
More reading:
– http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/21/facebook/
– http://www.facebook.com/#!/sitetour/connect.php
– http://mashable.com/2010/04/21/facebook-f8-2/
– http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/21/zuckerbergs-buildin-web-default-social/
– http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Roadmap_Open_Graph_API
