The 'Like' Button Revolution

Facebook is a part of life of millions of users. It’s no more just a social network. It’s an independent platform that has changed the way we experience content on the web and the way we express ourselves on the web.

Have you hear about the ‘Open Graph protocol’ by Facebook? It enables you to integrate your Web pages into the social graph. It is currently designed for Web pages representing profiles of real-world things — things like movies, sports teams, celebrities, and restaurants. Including Open Graph tags on your Web page makes your page equivalent to a Facebook page.

#-Link-Snipped-#This means when a user clicks a ‘like button’ on your page, a connection is made between your page and the user. Your page will appear in the "Likes and Interests" section of the user's profile, and you have the ability to publish updates to the user. Your page will show up in same places that Facebook pages show up around the site (e.g. search), and you can target ads to people who like your content. The structured data you provide via the Open Graph Protocol defines how your page will be represented on Facebook.

The future of the Web or what we call the ‘Web 3.0’ will be about more personalized experiences.  And Facebook has already initialized this process. For e.g. If you’re logged into Facebook and go to Pandora for the first time, it can immediately start playing songs from bands you’ve liked across the web. And as you’re playing music, it can show you friends who also like the same songs as you, and then you can click to see other music they like.

Facebook has given the power to all the websites to add the like button to their platforms. So, in other words we can say that now we are able to control the web based on what we like and what we don’t like. It’s truly a revolution at the click of a button. You get all things you ‘like’ at your profile. And it’s a great boon for all the flourishing brands. People will like your products and that’s a good deal: publicity free-of-cost.

Now a days in order to survive in this digital space, you have to be a part of the revolution. Web presence in the near future is going to thrive on the terms like social engagement, social data mining and geo-targeting. Facebook is becoming more powerful by the day and with the rapidly growing user base, it does an incredible work of continual improvement.

Some of us are worried about Facebook being the controller of all the information of millions of users. But, all the data across the World Wide Web is becoming increasingly personal, more targeted and at the same time, more open. This idea may be scary to some who fear for their privacy but I believe in the long run will only serve us all to effectively manage and to keep hold of the massive flow of data around us that we need to deal with on a daily basis.