Importance of Facebook Like Button in your Website

You are probably aware of the Open Graph Protocol introduced by Facebook. With the Open Graph Protocol, all the content in the web, both the websites and the web pages have turned into the graph objects (if the concerned websites have decided to embrace Open Graph Protocol). What that means is that every time you go to a website or a web page and press the like button, you associate your profile with the graph  object.

Leaving aside the privacy concerns, this has several benefits. The Open Graph Protocol is helpful in creating a semantic web – adding meaning to the web. Web in its infancy was more like a room with scattered objects. Different sites existed in isolation, all the sites were meant for one specific purpose, like you can send messages through a mail website, browse news through a news website, check weather on a weather site and so on.  Thus you may have to go to many websites for achieving a simple purpose like booking a flight from New York to London.

But now all the websites are exposing their services through API, which means that you can integrate the services of any website to a particular website. There are plenty of such websites like MyYahoo, iGoogle. Now comes the next challenge. With web2.0, the users are the kings. They can publish as well as consume the content. Web has also turned social. Now for every query in your mind, you go to some search engines. In most cases, you may not get the relevant information with the first search query.

Take for example: you are a computer science student, and a simple search like ‘algorithms’ may not give you relevant answers. You may get sites which are useful for those who are naive to the very term ‘algorithm’. But if the search engines or the web has information about you like your age, interests and your area of study, there is a higher probability that you get useful information in your very first search query. Even for advanced queries,  you can find accurate information based on your previous searches and the content you browsed through in the history.

Now adding a Facebook Like Button is helpful to the web, because it is not only available to Facebook, but also to other developers and sites. These websites can show information liked by your friends. You will definitely prefer a website liked by your close friends. As mentioned earlier, keeping aside the privacy concerns, your life on the web is made much easier and pleasant

Tags: Facebook, Facebook Like, Website