Facebook "Like": Social Media Shapes the Web

It appears that Facebook's "Like" feature is living up to expectations since it's official announcement early in April this year. According to a post on the TypePad company blog, users to installed Facebook's "Like" widget on their blogs were reporting increases in traffic from Facebook of up to 50%. TypePad now offers a series of installable "Like" widgets for Facebook that can be installed in either a blog sidebar or footer. According to the company over 2,400 users have installed the "Like" widget. Given the subsequent increases in blog traffic, its seems certain that more will follow.

The "Like" plugin is one small part of the Open Graph initiative, which aims to socialize the web by integrating social media more fully into the existing web. You may recall the announcement of Open Graph earlier this year at the F8 Developer Conference. Made jointly by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and FriendFeed CEO Bret Taylor (Facebook's new Director of Product), the pair outlined a platform that aims to fully socialize the web, customizing content from partnering sites according to user tastes as defined in their Facebook profile.

The "Like" plugin is one part of this platform and its early success bodes well for organizations working to increase their online visibility, be it social marketing, networking or business. Provided the feature is able to sustain and increase it's adoption and relevance, there are two benefits that become immediately evident: first, and most obviously, that organizational visibility will increase and could possibly do so quite dramatically. Second, this offers a simple yet powerful tool for organizations to easily reach out and increase visibility among niche & target audiences, especially those that might have similar interests but are otherwise unaffiliated.

From a broader perspective, the plugin provides a degree of crowd-sourced qualitative organization of the web. The "Like" button effectively turns a given page into a Facebook page and by clicking the button, users are effectively "voting" on it's relevance, in a manner similar to the way that clicking a given search result influences page relevance for Google search results. Individual users are enabled to affect relevance and influence the broader organizational structure of the web which could in turn help to shape the rules determining online visibility. While still in the early stages of adoption, this simple tools holds tremendous potential for reaching audiences and offers an easy transition from the static to the social web.