The “Like” button on Facebook has become ubiquitous around the web, and is well known for being both an effective social communication tool and a powerful marketing data collection device. Google emulated the technique with their +1 button, which they’ve angled to expand to the entire web.
So Facebook is stepping it up a notch.
The extremely popular social network has unveiled “actions,” designed to enhance the current system with a great deal more user generated data (and, consequently, a great deal more marketing value for Facebook). Whereas currently users can only say they like something or simply leave it alone, actions will allow users to indicate whether or not they’ve read a particular book, seen a movie, or purchased a piece of clothing. But there’s more than that. The technology is open for developers to work with as they like, and there are relatively few limits. You could just as easily see a “want” or “gift” button in retailer apps attached to your Timeline once the developers get going.
Like almost all Facebook interactions, the new action buttons will broadcast to your “subscribers” and friends. However, because they expect you to do a lot of actions (just like we do a lot of actions in real life), Facebook has made sure to only stream the action updates to the “ticker” and to your own Timeline, not to their walls. This will assist with the clutter that tends to develop on Timeline (which is a relatively poorly implemented data distribution system with a lot of inherent clutter, but that’s a separate issue). For those who make purchases that they aren’t particularly interested in sharing, like a gift or “adult” items, developers can set options for invisibility to the actions (thus only submitting the data to your own records – and Facebook’s marketing machine). Taken together, this is sure to give Facebook a marketing machine rivaled only by Google.
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