Facebook’s new Like button and its other social plugins launched on Wednesday have been getting a thumbs up from developers, marketers, analysts and users.
Just like the Like button, implementation of the new features on websites is simplicity itself. But their implications are deep and far reaching.
Liking something from now on will establish new social connections for the web and the Open Graph initiative can turn web pages essentially into Facebook pages.
As Bret Taylor, head of Facebook Platform products, explained, developers who fully embrace its Open Graph protocol can create Facebook-like pages on their sites with Like buttons that link back to users’ interests in their Facebook profiles and plugins that update their news feeds with developments.
“”So if you’re doing a movie release, you have whateverthemovie.com, why should you create another destination on Facebook for that?” he asked.
“Just add a Like button, add the Open Graph tags and then you have just one place where you’re distributing your brand and it’s still as socially-enabled as Facebook pages including the ability to publish updates to people who like it. So I think this is really powerful, I think it’s what Facebook pages should be, which is a web page.”
This socialisation of the web has been tried by many other services going back to Third Voice in 1999, but none have reached critical mass.
Facebook has every chance of success because website owners have every incentive to adopt its protocols – with more than 400m users, Facebook can drive tremendous traffic to their properties.
Mark Zuckerberg was bold enough to predict that when the Open Graph initiative was launched later on Wednesday, Facebook would serve 1bn Like buttons on external websites in the first 24 hours.
This much wider dissemination of Facebook on the web may alarm social networking rivals such as Twitter, MySpace and Google with its new Buzz service.
It is also more attractive in being a less proprietary solution than its predecessor, Facebook Connect.
Bret Taylor said the Open Graph protocol has been licensed under the Open Web Foundation agreement in order to encourage sites to add semantic metadata that will help both Facebook, search engines and other services tapping the social web.
Mr Taylor was formerly a founder of FriendFeed, the social networking service Facebook acquired last year, and he and his team appear to have brought some of its clearer thinking to Facebook and a welcome reduction in the complexity of its coding.
The Open Graph initiative had inspired a rearchitecting of the Facebook platform from the ground up with simplicity and stability in mind, he said.
”You shouldn’t need to download a ‘[software development kit] and you shouldn”t need to read 20,000 lines of documentation just to download a piece of data from Facebook, ” he said to applause from developers.
This is important in winning over the people who build sites. The new way of hooking into Facebook’s user data is elegant and seductive in its simplicity for developers, with clear metadata tags and plain-english hyperlinks.
At last count, Mark Zuckerberg’s “Building the Social Web together”blog post describing all this had received 1,741 Likes.
