WordPress.com yesterday added a new “Like” feature to its millions of blogs, making them more social and following in the footsteps of both Tumblr and of course, Facebook.
When a user clicks the “Like” star (which looks just like the Twitter Favorite star), a box appears that shows all of the people that have liked the post by showing their Gravatar icons. Also, when the Like star is clicked, this enables two things: first, the writer of the post sees the Like in their dashboard, and the user then receives a link in their own WordPress.com dashboard under a “Posts I Like” section.
Inside of the Post > Edit Post screen, bloggers will also be able to see a “Like Count”, that shows total Likes for each posts in a similar way as WordPress.com shows total Comments counts. There are also options to either turn off completely, or turn on selectively on a post-by-post basis, this new feature.
With this move, WordPress.com is making is not only giving a hat-tip to Facebook and Tumblr, but also making a smart move by integrating a popular feature directly into the fabric of the system. The system right now is based on Gravatar, but it will be interesting to see if other forms of sign-in will work with it as well. Regardless, this is a good move for WordPress.com and one that we’d certainly like to see in self-hosted WordPress.org soon.
For more info, WordPress.com has set up a Likes support page.
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