Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced an ambitious plan to spread its features across the internet, a move the company said would allow any website to instantly tailor itself based on a visitors’ friends and interests. The social-networking service, at a conference for developers in San Francisco, said its technology requires other companies to install a “Like” button on their websites that users can click on to signal their interest in a piece of content, such as a band or an article.
A person who views a CNN news article can see which of their Facebook friends have already “liked” an article, even if that person has never visited CNN before. In another, a person who clicks “like” on a movie such as “The Godfather” at the movie Web site IMDB.com will not only see that action on the person’s Facebook Newsfeed – Facebook will also automatically lists that movie on the person’s Facebook profile. When someone else clicks on “The Godfather” on that profile page they would then go to the Godfather page on IMDB. The same kind of sharing occurs when a user “likes” a band on music site Pandora. The Like button that connects other sites back to Facebook is a key part of Facebook’s plan – Zuckerberg said that when the new products launch later today, “We’re going to serve one billion ‘like’ buttons on the Web” in the first 24 hours. – from WSJ