The Facebook Like Button And Why You Should Care

UPDATE: Since writing this post I have joined the growing ranks of internet citizens who feel that the changes to Facebook's privacy policies are not acceptable. I am deleting my Facebook account. This post will remain as a matter of history.

Facebook has just announced the availability of new Social Widgets that allow site builders to integrate important Facebook functionality into their own sites. Perhaps the most recognizable widget is the Like button. Here's how the FB Geeks describe it:

The Like button enables users to make connections to your pages and share content back to their friends on Facebook with one click.

Now, I have not been the quickest person to warm up to Facebook. I have had an account for awhile, but spent most of my time in Twitter to scratch my social networking itch. However, in the last few weeks as I planned and built the new version of this site, I have spent much more time with Facebook and I am starting to see the attraction.

I did not know Facebook was going to add this new widgetery, but as soon as I started reading about it I knew I needed to use it. Why? Well, let's face it, like most businesses I need to market - aggressively. In some ways freelancers are competing with sites like istock; not to mention every other photographer with a computer and a clue. Social Media "Experts" abound these days, so I won't pretend to play one here. Besides, it should come as no secret, social media can help you market in ways that were never dreamed of even a few years ago.

So what's the big deal? Facebook has 400 million active users; half of which log on every day - Kind of hard to ignore being able to reach that kind of market for the price. And the new Like button and other Social Widgets from Facebook allow that market to interact with your site using familiar tools and concepts in a low-friction (read no extra log on) fashion. But it may not stop there. Facebook has also announced the Open Graph protocol to go along with their Social Widgets.

This is where it becomes hard to not get all Geeky on you, but since I am not that smart we should be OK. For over a decade now really smart people like Tim Berners Lee and Tim Bray have been talking about the semantic web and things that go with it like RDF. The good news is, if your a photographer, you have probably at least heard the term metadata. And you might even know it roughly translates to info about info. Metadata can be handy because one of the challenges on the web is being able to describe things in a way that computers can understand - things like image files and prints. All the metadata you jam into an image file helps, but it's very easy to loose context in the transfer between computers. Think of the Starbucks cup you probably have someplace around the mess that is your desk. On the cup is that little burnt-beans-are-freakin-hot sleeve which says something like "Made with 100% recycled Post Consumer blah blah" (I actually do not have one handy believe it or not). Now think of the poor computer trying to understand why you are drinking coffee that's made with 100% recycled anything. Huh?!? Yeah, that's the problem. A computer can make inferences if it's programmed to AND it has some data structured in a way that helps it make those inferences. We know the "100% recycled" bit pertains to the anti-3rd-degree-burn sleeve and not the coffee - we hope. The computer has a much harder time with that concept.

And the part about Facebook and the Open Graph protocol? That's Facebook's attempt to adopt RDF and lend some structure and context to all those things you will be Liking on around the web. And perhaps the biggest reason that RDF and semantic web have struggled is the distinct lack of systems that are reading and writing RDF. A standard is not a standard if nobody uses it. But that may all be about to change if Facebook has it's way - 400 million users clicking on Like buttons all over the web starts to generate a bunch of semantic info that can be used in a variety of ways - some useful and some probably creepy. Just make the assumption that if you Like something, everyone else knows you Like something and it'll be OK. Probably. Yes, there are issues to work through, but overall this is perhaps the biggest thing to get excited about since The Big Bang Theory showed up on CBS.

For my part I plan to keep a very close eye on these developments at Facebook. I have already integrated the Like button on this site as well as their Comments widget. I also plan to start describing my work using Open Graph protocol and other RDF schema that make it easier for people to find, enjoy and buy my work.