You may have noticed an interesting trend recently where you can connect to more and more website by using your Facebook name. At first it was just social media sites, but now all kinds of websites are jumping on the bandwagon and soon, if Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has his way, everything will. Zuckerberg just gave the keynote speech at the Facebook’s F8 developer conference and Business Insider summed it up in an article entitled, “Facebook Announces Plan To Infiltrate The Entire Web”. Reading the post made it distressingly clear that the headline was not at all hyperbolic.
Basically, the idea is that you will now be able to do more than just “like” your friend’s drunken party pictures; you’ll be able to “like” everything. Websites will soon begin adding toolbars and “like” buttons onto their designs that are directly connected to Facebook. These will enable readers to share and “like” any internet content instantly as well as see which of their friends have accessed the sites recently and what they thought.
If you’re questioning why designers would want to add these possibly tacky tools to their interface, the answer is simple: traffic.
From Business Insider:
“Facebook will add ‘Like’ buttons to sites across the web. If you like content, you can just hit ‘like.’ It will be noted by Facebook. If more of your friends click ‘like,’ it can be added to your stream on Facebook. This may then send traffic back to the originating site, which gives publishers an incentive to put more Facebook buttons on their pages. Zuckerberg expects 1 billion ‘likes’ for Facebook in the first 24 hours.”
Of course, this is definitely going to spread like wild fire once it begins. No website is going to want to be left out of something that is going to bring traffic to their competitors. Facebook will likely make their mark on the majority of the internet. So, let’s all welcome our future Facebook overlords. We welcome their upcoming control and greet them with open arms.
Now, quick, go and “like” this post before we get whipped!
