Not Liking All This Facebook Liking Stuff

Okay, I'll be the first to admit I wasn't a big fan of the term "fan page" to describe Facebook's pages for businesses and other branded entities. But at least the invitation to "Become a fan!" worked pretty well as a simple call to action. Now what are we page admins supposed to say? "Please like me!"... ? (Visions of Sally Field now running through my head...)

I'm also not crazy about the impact it has from a user's point of view. Pretty much all I can do on Facebook now is to like something. I "like" my friends' status updates. I "like" The Closer. I "like" Wildlife Photography. And I "like" Can THIS Pickle Get More Fans than THAT Pickle?

Okay, I don't really like the last one, but apparently 961 people do. Which pretty much shows the value of liking something on Facebook.

The problem is that when you "like" everything, it gives no sense whatsoever of how important something might be to you. Yes, becoming a fan may sound a bit ridiculous in certain cases (see pickle page, above). But for those pages that really represent companies or nonprofit organizations or public figures, it indicated a higher level of interest to me than simply liking it. You were saying you were interested in this entity's activities enough that you wanted to be informed when there was something new going on with it.

And the above doesn't even take into account the new "Universal Like" feature where you'll now find Like buttons on all sorts of third-party websites. According to Facebook, more than 50,000 sites added the button within one week of it becoming available, although I can't say I've seen it in that many places I visit yet. (I did notice with interest that CNN changed the button to say Recommend. I guess they realized people aren't going to want to say they "like" some types of articles—for example the news that the Gulf oil spill may soon reach the coastline...)

My problem with this implementation is that when you like something, it just gets added to your list of Recent Activities and posted to others' news feeds as a one-liner, which means it's just going to get lost in the noise. I prefer the standard Share function, where you get to add a comment and have a thumbnail and blurb from the article appear in your newsfeed, drawing more attention to it.

Note: On CNN, when you click the Recommend button and use the text box to add a comment, it actually gets converted to the Share function, which at least gives you the option of doing either. However, I don't know if other sites offer the same option.

Universal Like and Your Privacy

In my previous post, How To Stop Facebook's Latest Attacks on Your Privacy, I mentioned that I wasn't yet sure what privacy implications there might be regarding the universal Like feature. From what I can tell, it's not a problem. This feature doesn't share any of your information with the third-party site. When you see your profile pic come up after clicking a Like button, from a technical standpoint, that information is contained within a special frame that is generated by Facebook, not the third-party site. So it's no different than your friends seeing your picture in their news feeds on FB (non-friends won't see your name or picture). So while it may be a bit disconcerting to see your face show up on CNN, it doesn't appear to be a violation of your privacy.

Note also that if you change your mind and no longer wish to like or recommend a web page, you need to click the button again. (This wasn't at all obvious to me when I first tried it.)

More information about the universal like buttons (officially referred to as "social plugins") is available on the Facebook Help Center.

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