Facebook recently introduced the world to its Open Graph vision and with it came the Facebook ‘Like’ button.
Prior to the Like button, Facebook had its own retweet, like Share button which gave users the ability to share content they came across into their Facebook stream.
Both the ‘Like’ and ‘Share’ Buttons did very similar things except the Share Button would permit images and other content to be imported whereas ‘likes’ would simply show a comment like format in your personal Facebook feed showing that you had liked something (shown below).
At some point in the last 24 hours, Facebook seems to have sensibly combined the two and in effect made the original Share Button negligible. As a publisher, this is welcome news, with the masses of buttons and limited space, being able to remove one button shouldn’t feel this satisfying.
We’ve contacted Facebook for confirmation and will update this post with further details as soon as we hear back from them.
Update: We’ve received confirmation from Facebook that the Like and Share button counters will now show identical figures. Both perform the same functionality except the share button will allow the sharing of images into streams in a much more obvious manner, whereas the ‘Like’ button will only show the above formatting when it appears in a user’s stream unless you insert the URL of the post into comment. Make sense?
Try it with out like option. Like this post and then copy and paste the URL of the post into the comment field that appears after. This isn’t just a way for us to get you liking our stuff by the way.
The official statement:
Share is still an option, however we merged the external count so that the count represents total interactions with the URL.
Additionally, ‘like’ still gives you the ability to publish an image when a comment is added (through the XFBML version).
This has been the case before too, have been observing this on my website since some weeks.
Well let me explain my technical view of the whole situation. I think the whole story is not “sensible combination” but facebook’s “neglect to do proper implementation” when the feature launched.
My story is following:
1) I was using facebook’s share button on my site for some time (http://totalfinder.binaryage.com/)
2) when the like button came out, I started using its FBML version via Javascript SDK
2a) as you can see by viewing sources of the page, my canonical url set via META tag og:url is “http://totalfinder.binaryage.com” – this url was giving me new like counter starting from zero
2b) at the time of the like button launch I’ve also experimented with og:url set to “http://totalfinder.binaryage.com/” (please note the trailing backslash) – this url was displaying like button with my current share button counter (1000+likes)
So Max Mint is right, that this feature is not new. It was there from the beginning.
What is new is Facebook’s policy how they sanitize og:url field. Originally they took it exactly as specified in og:url and used it to lookup like button counter, so trailing slash WAS significant. Newly (like 3 days ago) they started to force trailing slash (I would guess they are probably doing other sanitizations too, like removing extraneous query parameters, double slashes, etc.)
Anyway, the end result for my site is that they dropped my like counters and duplicated all my admin pages on facebook. Which is sad.
Why? Because in the beginning I decided to go with urls without trailing slashes. I was collecting likes for some time and with this change they effectively reset my counter to different values (zeor as for many other people without share button who reported on developer forums). My own “admin click” on like button creates duplicate admin page in Facebook’s “Pages” interface.
I’m a developer and I can imagine how this was implemented. They have function which computes hash value (id) from canonical url and does query for counter with this id. By touching function which computes canonical url from specified url they effectively change the mapping between url space and existing counters. I strongly believe their programmer did a fatal mistake. Every time they touch this mapping function they should merge existing counters (possibly unreachable) into new ones so people don’t lose their counters and existing admin pages.
I general I agree with sanitizing urls and making them canonical to reduce confusion for newcomers. I just disagree with the technical way how they messed the existing data without technical explanation available on their developer forums for more than 3 days now.
That is my explanation of the behavior. Please note, that I may be totally wrong.
I always enjoy seeing comments that are longer than the post they comment on. :-)
LOL. Yeah.
I noticed this on my web app http://www.checkinmania.com , I just had FB share button initially and then I added FB like button, it had different counts until 3 days ago, and now both show same combined count.
Logical Move.
it shows me 15 shares and 15 likes now…
old story!!!
For a publisher such as yourself from a real estate perspective this is is welomed move. However, I wonder what this will do to the CTR on Facebook on Shared/Liked stories.
Like.
Wow, now thats what I am talking about. Way to go Facebook!
Kim
http://www.complete-anonymity.at.tc
[I just posted the following comment using the Facebook Comment Plugin on this post... but these comments don't seem to be stored anywhere other than posted to the respective user's FB acct. I wonder if the Admin can see them via the ghost pages along with all the data on the "Likers"?!]
With the Comments Plugin enabled (alongside the Like Plugin) the Share button is no longer needed as the Comments serves the same purpose. I’m typing this on the original post on thenextweb.com and this’ll show up on my FB wall now. MUCH better than the little unnoticeable one-liner Likes!! :) I just wish the Comment… field was larger than 1.5 lines!! I’m sure you can configure that!!
Tested it and it works. But the copy/paste url is awkward. The whole point of those “retweet”, “like” and other social buttons is that you should be able to handle things with a few clicks without having to bother with copy/pasting stuff. Anyway…
agreed.
That’s great! I will be able to share my findings more conveniently as well. :)
Edmund
Dating Expert
http://howtogetmyexbackinfo.org/
Hi Boris,
Same here. I have tried it out and it is abit awkward as well. I guess things will continue to improve in future. :)
Christine
http://breastactivesinfo.org/