Facebook’s ‘Like’ button makes me lonely
groups.csail.mit.edu
groups.csail.mit.edu
The conclusion we came to was the same as this article and we calculated it using almost the same route. For cnn if 1,000 people like a story, given that there are 400,000,000 Facebook users and if we assume my friends visit cnn with equal probability as other Facebook users and that I have 300 friends, we get that their is a ~1/1000 probability that my friends like a cnn story. Sum up over 10 major stories that day, we get that I only have a 1/100 chance of seeing any activity at cnn.com from my friends. And this is the case for cnn, one of the largest websites in the country; the probability of seeing any friend activity on a smaller site will be much much lower. The numbers just don't work out for mainstream adoption of the Facebook like button.
This does however work better on a site like yelp or pandora, where if my friend ever liked a restaurant it will stay relevant for a longer period of time. Still, I think that the Facebook like button will only make sense for a few websites on the entire web (and likely not one that anyone who is reading this is working on).
If you want to see how it pans out on a smaller site, you can check out http://www.texastribune.org.
1. When someone tells a friend "I really liked X", that usually indicates (a) that they liked X enough to be worth bringing up in conversation, and (b) that they thought X might be of specific interest to that friend.
2. When someone clicks a "like" button, it usually indicates that they liked X enough to be worth clicking a button when someone asked them to; and it doesn't involve any discrimination among their friends at all.
3. "Friend" on social networking sites typically means something more like "acquaintance" in other contexts; it's common to have "friends" on BuzzMyFace.com whom one hardly knows.
Put these together: clicking on one of those "like" buttons "tells" more people than you would likely talk to about such things (3) including ones to whom you'd never mention it because they wouldn't be interested (2) and ones with whom you wouldn't bother bring it up because it wasn't important enough to take up conversation time (1,2).
Yeah, the signal-to-noise ratio from these things is better than from spam. It's still much lower than from recommendations in actual human conversation. And it's "without downside" in the exact same way as spam is, although to a lesser degree: the downside is real, but gets shared among all the people whose daily lives get just a little bit more clogged with irrelevant stuff.
I guess the value depends on the content and who your friends are!
Why would this set off privacy alarms? It's just an iframe. It's not like the site owner can see what's going on inside of it; they still have to follow the cross domain rules in the browser.
I ended up adding "127.0.0.1 connect.facebook.net" to my /etc/hosts.
I think technical people underestimate how much people understand their privacy settings on Facebook, but I don't see how any normal person could understand this case.