Posts tagged Open Graph
Or why I don’t Like Google’s new social recommendation button.
When Facebook launched their Like button, I wrote about how the weak signals provided by users Liking content across the web could prove a powerful weapon for Facebook in a looming battle with Google to help users discover content.
“Likes” could be used to infer significance in the way that Google had done for a decade with backlinks, but with some additional advantages over backlinks:
- Over time, a far broader spread of the population has the potential to “Like” than is ever likely to create a backlink: the liking signals are thus more powerful
- By knowing the identify of Likers, Facebook has a better chance to avoid the issues of spam that have become associated with backlinks and Google.
- Having built out the social graph, Facebook is also able to use the preferences of friends to build on the raw ‘Like’ data.
Google’s clearly worried about this, and announced their ‘Like’ equivalent, the +1 button this week.
It’s a valiant attempt to play catch-up, and a huge hat-tip to Zuckerberg’s genius in extending the Like button across the entire web. But I’m not sure it’s enough:
- Where’s the incentive for users to “+1” something? In particular I can’t fathom why a consumer would +1 a search result listing, presumably before even visiting the associated site. Unless Google can make Google Profiles a credible competitor to Facebook, I don’t see many doing this. Given their track record in social, neither do I see Google making Profiles a credible competitor to Facebook.
- On the other hand, you can guarantee that SEOs, particularly those with the darker shades of headwear, will be all over this. The potential incentive of a higher ranking position means that non-average-consumers will attempt to game the system. This is bad for Google.
- Without Facebook’s Social Graph advantage, it will be harder for Google to weed out +1 spam. Also, they won’t have Facebook’s advantage of being able to understand preferences based on connections preferences. Even if they were to use their Gmail data (which, presumably they won’t do after the Buzz debacle) there are still far fewer Gmail users than Facebook users.
Google’s best hope for success is via YouTube, their only real social success. They need to replace the thumbs up “Like” (!) button with +1, and start building the social graph between friends on YouTube who’ve never posted videos (rather than just subscribers to video channels). YouTube videos are probably one of the most shared items on Facebook: Google needs to attempt to capture this sharing directly in YouTube and cut-out the middle man. But given Facebook’s head start in mapping the social graph, this won’t be easy.
In short, I’m still backing Facebook to win this war: it’s going to be easier for Facebook to build search than it is for Google to build social.
(For the opposite opinion, read Tom Critchlow’s article on SEOmoz, which also explains +1 in more detail)
A friend asked me how to add Facebook Like buttons to their Tumblr blog. Thinking others might ask the same question, I thought I’d just write it up here.
[Updated: Since writing this post I’ve updated my Tumblr theme to an off-the-shelf design with integrated Facebook Like buttons … but did use the method below to add Facebook Like buttons (and Twitter buttons) to my other blog, Best Practice eCommerce]
Hot to add Facebook Like Buttons in 5 Simple Steps
It’s pretty straightforward to add Facebook Like Buttons to your Tumblr blog. Just follow these steps:
- Go to http://www.tumblr.com/dashboard and log in to Tumblr
- Click on ‘Customize’ - in the right hand menu, with the spanner logo by it
- Click on ‘Theme’ in the top menu bar
- If you’re not already, click on ‘Use Custom HTML’
- Copy and paste the following into the HTML, just before {/block:Posts}
<iframe src=”http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href={URLEncodedPermalink};layout=standard&show_faces=true&
width=450&action=like&colorscheme=light” scrolling=”no” frameborder=”0” allowTransparency=”true” style=”border:none; overflow:hidden; width:450px; height:75px”></iframe>
This adds Facebook Like buttons at the bottom of all your Tumblr posts, no matter what form they take. If you want to change the appearance of the Like button, there’s a tool on the Facebook site that helps you do it here. All you need to remember is that the subject of the ‘Like’, which follows the href= text needs to be {URLEncodedPermalink}: this just automatically makes the subject of the ‘Like’ the URL of that particular post. Clear? If not, just post a comment and I’ll try to clarify.
If you’re interested in this, you might also be interested in my other posts about Facebook Like buttons:
