Have you ever noticed a salesperson who makes sure he grabs you by your pockets if you happen to Like any product? I have been through that and it irritates me how he tries to sell me everything that he thinks might interest me. I feel he thinks I am a slave, someone owned to obey his commands.
Facebook, to a certain extent gives me the same vibes and with its Web wide Like strategy, it makes my fear concrete.
So what exactly would this ‘Like’ do?
A good question and those of you who think it’s nothing but simply a button added to Web: it means a lot. What happens when you like anything on the social network? It spreads all across your network, appears in news feeds of your friends, re-liked and spreads further. Your Likes are actually getting Facebook to learn and that means a lot to the social network:
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Better targeted advertisement
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More appropriate recommendations
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Prediction of your moves [this sounds a bit Sci-fi-philosophical]
To sum it up, you are heading closer to being controlled by the network instead of you controlling it. And I personally wouldn’t want Facebook to have all that power, I think distributed and its a good news that its rivals are teaming up for a similar alternative. That is what Google, Yahoo and Twitter are doing; letting you share your information across other social networks. Take Twitter for example and its latest development with @anywhere, which enables you to sign in from any site.
The move by Mark Zuckerberg comes from observing similar networks falling from heights of popularity to oblivion. Take MySpace for example or Friendster even before that, they were toppled by the next big name. Why? because they concentrated themselves into being destinations, exactly like Yahoo. And for each destinations, it is obvious that users will boot you and adopt a better and more pleasant destination.
Facebook is thinking otherwise, expand itself and weave itself around the Web, no matter where you go, Facebook is following you. Google is the best example of that, just like you see Google Search box at every site, you will also see a Facebook Like button somewhere, everywhere. There is just one problem: privacy.
Why?
I wont stretch this one too much and wrap it in a few sentences. When it comes to spreading all across the Web, Facebook might very well have to share user data with third parties excessively, which is a major issue that continues to hover over Facebook. The social network wont comment on this and we hope it has a better strategy than putting user data on the table to share with third party sites, something I wouldn’t like to be a part of.
You are welcome into our camp anytime! Unlike what Facebook appears to be doing, our key goal at myLykes (www.mylykes.com) is to give people ownership and control of their preference data with full transparency. We believe that people wish to provide meaningful preference info rather than a simple “thumbs up” – but on their terms. Certainly, Facebook has made it very easy to perform the action of capturing a basic interest given that most people don’t fill out or maintain their interest profiles. But unfortunately simple content creation mechanisms like this produce exponential amounts of junk and noise. In fact, because the Facebook “Like” feature is essentially a Boolean button click, it reduces the whole user interest profile to a list of positive or negative associations. Users, however, are increasingly seeking to individualize their input by indicating degrees of liking and adding some qualitative (or colorful) comments. Article comment posts are a great example of this – inline commenting technology has evolved to offer much more than simple open text fields (i.e. voting, threading, etc.). Without additional context or a measure of preference intensity, advertisers and marketers will find it difficult to derive meaningful data for more effective targeting.
Moreover, users will probably find little meaning with a “Liked” item other than the temporal enthusiasm they get from seeing the ticker go up (ala Kip Drordy style). It also won’t be easy to parse through someone’s preference data (liked items) and get a picture of that person’s tastes if they are all generic and simply annotated. Moreover, the act of linking one or a whole swath of pages to a user’s profile will essentially create a new pile of useless links that friends cannot easily search or sort through.
Glad someone else feels similarly about controlling their preferences online. Thanks for the great article!
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