Source: Facebook To Launch Read, Listened, Watched, And Want Buttons
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
A little disappointing. This will be moderately successful, because all the People will put it next to their like button.
The Like button is used because people like to give active statements about something. I don't have any data about this, but i assume the usage is declining because there is no real benefit for liking something.
Where is the benefit for clicking Read, or Watched? They will probably argue "Sharing", but there are already too much Kitten videos on Facebook.
What happened to the Social Graph from the last f8? There were some big buzzwords like "everything is connected" , but i still don't see what changed since then.
They have so many brilliant Developers.
The best thing i can remember is HipHop for PHP and the Open Compute project.
They don't really try anything out of their comfort zone. The whole Deals thing got almost no promotion, was introduced silently and disappeared silently. There were some rumors about a Facebook Phone, that would have been interesting but no...
After a month no one clicked one, and it slowed down the website even though it was loaded asynchronously after the page was done loading. It took on average 500 ms to load according to Firebug, and sometimes it even timed out, leaving an ugly error message where the iframe was.
As for the ubiquity of Like, the new buttons will probably look like a Like button, and probably use an icon from the Facebook interface. That should help people make the connection to Facebook.
More buttons higher pageloads because not many sites use the 2-click versions yet.
Maybe someone should rethink the overall share model and find a new way to do it. Over time there will be more and more buttons all over the place.
Its good for improving page loads because you dont have to wait for 3rd party servers and also its an improvment for user privacy because your site is not automatically sending content informations into the graphs of all these sites just because someone opens a webpage.
I can only link to one project i know of, but its in german only atm http://www.heise.de/extras/socialshareprivacy/ another example would be techcrunch but as far as i can tell they only use it to improve the overall pageload experience.
I don't mean to point fingers, but I don't think this sort of thing is going to get any better: http://i.imgur.com/VeUr1.png
People are not stupid, this won't catch
Also, facebook is getting all bloated