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I Like This – a Facebook "Dislike" Button for the Entire Web

Posted on June 6, 2010 by jessestay

A post to Facebook by Ryan Merket (former Facebook employee, founder of Ping.fm, and now founder of Appbistro) inspired me to check out a new Facebook App by Zach Allia that lets you “dislike” any website on the internet. The app is simple – you add a little bookmarklet to your browser and connect it with Facebook. Now any website you visit you can “dislike”, and your dislike appears on your Facebook Wall for all your friends to see.

Merket and I had a little fun with the app. He would dislike one political figure’s Facebook Page, and I would then go and dislike the opposite political figure. Or, he would dislike something and I would go “like” his recent dislike. I even went to one of his dislikes, clicked the permalink for the dislike, and disliked his dislike! (Have a headache yet?)

The app doesn’t just work on Facebook. You can go to any website on the internet and click the little “Dislike” bookmarklet and your dislike will appear. In addition, you can go to http://likebutton.me and get a similar like bookmarklet to like things on the internet in a similar manner.

This is a totally cool idea, and great example of the simplicity of Facebook Graph API. I predict it will be very popular due to Facebook and other sites’ lack of a “dislike” button for the network. I hope he can find a good way to monetize the concept. In a recent environment of negativity on the internet, this app could just provide a little level of fun and positivity to Facebook. “dislike” is the new “poke”. 😉

Check out, and “like” the app at http://dislikebutton.me/

Do you “like” the concept?

Facebook’s Like Button for the Whole Internet – Here’s How it Works

Posted on March 25, 2010 by jessestay

Techcrunch today talked about a new “Like Button for the Whole Internet” which Facebook looks to be launching some time soon, and has been tested amongst several developers as they’ve been told. What they didn’t mention is that you can access the code for this right now in the code to the latest open source Javascript SDK. While it does not currently work in its current form, it is open for the entire public to see, and has been there for the last few months (along with a few other hints I’ll let you find).

Assuming the source of the new SDK (currently in alpha) remains the same, the XFBML button can be placed on any website on the internet, and it increments the number of likes when a user clicks on it. By default it increments the likes for the current page, but there appears to also be the ability to specify a “permalink” attribute, along with a URL to another page. It’s unclear if that will be changeable in the XFBML tag or not. Also, a required “node_type” attribute that defaults to “page” can be set. Lastly, an optional “page_url” can be set. The XFBML tag loads content from /widgets/like.php (attributes of the XFBML tag get passed as attributes in the URL). That URL appears to be disabled at the moment.

So it looks like the XFBML tag will look something like the following, and it will be part of Facebook’s widgets architecture:

Also of interest, Facebook has an entire tag library devoted to the new tag, like.js. You can probably gain a little more info from that. I can’t wait for them to turn on like.php so we can play with this.

My book, FBML Essentials, may just get a lot more interesting as Facebook prepares for their “OpenGraph API”, enabling any website to become its own Facebook Fan Page across the internet. This is one of many tags I’ve seen that are very interesting – see if you can look through the code and find anything else that looks interesting like this. I love being a developer. 🙂

Screenshots Emerge of the New Twitter Retweet Feature

Posted on November 5, 2009 by jessestay

Nick Shin just wrote me mentioning he has the new Twitter retweet feature on his account, @marketwire. He wrote about it on his blog which you can read here. It would appear it works very much in a similar way to how Twitter original mentioned.

To start, users with this feature will have a message at the top of their stream mentioning they have the new features. Each Tweet in your timeline on Twitter.com will have a new “retweet” icon that appears similar to the “reply” link when you mouse over a Tweet. When you click on it, you are asked if you want to retweet the message. Click “yes”, and it gets popped at the top of your friends’ streams, along with a mention that you retweeted it (this is very similar to the way “likes” work on FriendFeed – the message keeps getting recycled so long as people keep liking it).

Underneath each message, it lists each user that retweeted the post. Instead of being icons of each user, it looks like Twitter is now going the FriendFeed method and listing out the text usernames of each user. This also brings more discovery potential for each user that retweeted it.

So, today marks the day Twitter grows even more like FriendFeed it would seem. I think this will eventually become even more powerful than the old-form “RT soandso” format because it is much easier to just click a button than type text, but we’ll see how frequently people use this and if the old style continues to be tradition as it is today. “Retweets” are the new like. Do you have it? Do you “like” the new retweet feature?

The images above are just 2 of the images listed on Nick Shinn’s blog. Be sure to check out his blog for more screenshots and info. You can follow him on Twitter here.