4 ms·

I think Facebook is vastly overestimating the number of people who are actually going to go out and "like" stuff.

sanj 16y ago
The effort of Liking is easily an order of magnitude less than creating a link, which is what (nominally) Google uses. And I'd SWAG that an order of magnitude more people are capable of Liking than are even able to create a new link.
- Aaronontheweb 16y ago
  The effort to implement a like button on a site is an order of magnitude more difficult than implementing a link.
  - steveklabnik 16y ago
    Actually, it's not. Instead of an a tag, it's an iframe where the link is passed in as a parameter. It took me approximately 90 seconds to implement from looking at the docs to deploy to one of my sites.
    - jonknee 16y ago
      Technically 90 seconds is an order of magnitude more difficult than making a regular link. Not a huge hurdle, but I don't need to read any docs or go fetch embed code to make a link.
      - steveklabnik 16y ago
        ... I guess it's also because I'm using Rails, so I'm already generating links via a helper function. So I wrote another, one line helper that does the wrapping. So that initial 90 seconds is amortized over every new Like button I add, because I use like_url rather than link_to. Also, often like buttons are used on something like stories, so you're only adding the code to one template, and now you have tons of like buttons all over.
        bbwharris 16y ago
        I chose to go the other route which takes even longer. Load the XFBML version, and include the open graph meta tags. I did the same thing that you did, wrapped it all in a like_url helper.
steveklabnik 16y ago
I don't know, man. The NHL, for example, has seen tons of engagement related to liking things. http://scobleizer.com/2010/04/22/facebook-ambition/ http://scobleizer.com/2010/04/22/facebook-ambition/
jonknee 16y ago
That and if my friends likes are valuable to me. Considering my having to ban Farmville and the like I'm pretty sure I don't want my social graph having anything to do with my search results.

sanj 16y ago

The effort of Liking is easily an order of magnitude less than creating a link, which is what (nominally) Google uses. And I'd SWAG that an order of magnitude more people are capable of Liking than are even able to create a new link.

Aaronontheweb 16y ago
The effort to implement a like button on a site is an order of magnitude more difficult than implementing a link.
- steveklabnik 16y ago
  Actually, it's not. Instead of an a tag, it's an iframe where the link is passed in as a parameter. It took me approximately 90 seconds to implement from looking at the docs to deploy to one of my sites.
  - jonknee 16y ago
    Technically 90 seconds is an order of magnitude more difficult than making a regular link. Not a huge hurdle, but I don't need to read any docs or go fetch embed code to make a link.
    - steveklabnik 16y ago
      ... I guess it's also because I'm using Rails, so I'm already generating links via a helper function. So I wrote another, one line helper that does the wrapping. So that initial 90 seconds is amortized over every new Like button I add, because I use like_url rather than link_to. Also, often like buttons are used on something like stories, so you're only adding the code to one template, and now you have tons of like buttons all over.
      - bbwharris 16y ago
        I chose to go the other route which takes even longer. Load the XFBML version, and include the open graph meta tags. I did the same thing that you did, wrapped it all in a like_url helper.

steveklabnik 16y ago

I don't know, man. The NHL, for example, has seen tons of engagement related to liking things. http://scobleizer.com/2010/04/22/facebook-ambition/ http://scobleizer.com/2010/04/22/facebook-ambition/

jonknee 16y ago

That and if my friends likes are valuable to me. Considering my having to ban Farmville and the like I'm pretty sure I don't want my social graph having anything to do with my search results.