Facebook’s Plan for Internet Domination.
How to get your own like button
A small change in the way Facebook captures users preferences gives us a clue into their long term plan to unseat Google as the internet’s number one company.
Facebook recently changed the wording for signifying support of a page. You no longer ‘become a fan’ instead you ‘like’ content such as Facebook pages and more interestingly now – other websites.
All website administrators can now install a ‘like’ (old terminology – become a fan) button on any website by inserting a little html into the page. You can actually choose whether to have the button use like or recommend depending on your own preference – the setup dialog is shown to the right here.
Here’s the lowdown on how to get a like button on your website:
http://developers.facebook.com/like
All website administrators should also be aware of how to get the maximum benefits out of this new feature through managing and monitoring their sites activity within Facebook’s social graph.
The Open Graph Protocol
Facebook recommended best practice for websites about real world objects such as people, teams, companies and organisations – is to include extra information pertinent to the object within the websites meta data. This is called following the “Open Graph Protocol”.
For example – the latitude and longitude defining the location a restaurant, as well as the page title, description, preferred image as well as Facebook side page administrators can all be defined within the websites meta data. Contact information such as telephone numbers and email addresses can also be defined.
For products a UPC code or ISBN code can be attached to facilitate identification.
Administrators do need to “like” the page themselves to enable them to administrate and view the Facebook statistics on the page.
Additionally one should be aware that after 10 likes the title and type of the page become fixed to prevent confusion on the part of users who have previously ‘liked’ an object.
An alternative way to index the web?
Essentially, it seems like Facebook have decided to embrace the “pre-social graph web” and make it as simple as possible for all those legacy websites to get social and receive the benefits of being part of the social media revolution without having to create their own Facebook pages.
The ultimate strategy would appear to create a “more human” socially indexed web instead of the algorithm indexed web that most of us use at present thanks to Google.
Personally, I have my doubts about the quality control of 90% of people on Facebook so I am quite skeptical about the usefulness of this approac but time will tell which proves the most productive when it comes down to searching the ever expanding internet.
Another competitor to the “big G” and an alternative approach to the problem of indexing the web can only be a good thing for everyone. Google must be a tiny bit worried.
Further reading on the details of the Facebook Open Graph Protocol implementation can be found here:
