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I clicked it and haven't gotten my note yet... By "spam", I think you're saying they can put something into my news feed, right? If this opted me into email c

I clicked it and haven't gotten my note yet... By "spam", I think you're saying they can put something into my news feed, right? If this opted me into email communication or even facebook messages, I might be alarmed. Related: I generally trust things that I "like" to behave in a polite way... And know that if they don't they are going to quickly eat a social media backlash. I can see some nice ways this could be used-- for example-- I "like" Bingo Card Creator and you say, "Thanks Tony! I see you just bought your copy of BCC a few days ago. Holler if I can help!" I agree that this is an odd/dumb thing for FB to do, but I'm not sure it's that scary.

tptacek 16y ago
Kind of agree; also, I'm just not as possessive of my Facebook feed as I am of my mail spool. I really don't feel like I own my feed. Also, Facebook acts against its own interests if they allow random sites to pollute the feed.
- pyre 16y ago
  I have to agree that it's against Facebook's own interests. If they let random sites spam away, then pretty soon it will turn into MySpace, and competitors will eat its lunch.
patio11 16y ago
So I think that is not technically speaking impossible but you have to really, really contrive it to make Like facilitate a BCC-to-Tony narrowcast. You can create "groups of one" by altering the URLs being liked to make them unique, saving the association that "Tony" => "uniqueUserID" somewhere outside of Facebook, installing a callback function to let your website know when one of your unique URLs gets liked, and then broadcasting a Tony-pleasing message to Tony's group of one. But what is actually going to happen is Tony is going to favorite the front page / the product / etc (those two aren't necessarily the same thing), and then the only option for talking to Tony is to take out Ye Old Megaphone and blast everyone who likes the front page / product / etc.
sstrudeau 16y ago
I clicked the "Like" button and did not see anything on my news feed. And then I opened up Facebook on my mobile device and it was plastered with notes from patio11's site...

tptacek 16y ago

Kind of agree; also, I'm just not as possessive of my Facebook feed as I am of my mail spool. I really don't feel like I own my feed. Also, Facebook acts against its own interests if they allow random sites to pollute the feed.

pyre 16y ago
I have to agree that it's against Facebook's own interests. If they let random sites spam away, then pretty soon it will turn into MySpace, and competitors will eat its lunch.

patio11 16y ago

So I think that is not technically speaking impossible but you have to really, really contrive it to make Like facilitate a BCC-to-Tony narrowcast. You can create "groups of one" by altering the URLs being liked to make them unique, saving the association that "Tony" => "uniqueUserID" somewhere outside of Facebook, installing a callback function to let your website know when one of your unique URLs gets liked, and then broadcasting a Tony-pleasing message to Tony's group of one. But what is actually going to happen is Tony is going to favorite the front page / the product / etc (those two aren't necessarily the same thing), and then the only option for talking to Tony is to take out Ye Old Megaphone and blast everyone who likes the front page / product / etc.

sstrudeau 16y ago

I clicked the "Like" button and did not see anything on my news feed. And then I opened up Facebook on my mobile device and it was plastered with notes from patio11's site...