Facebook is responsible for a great deal of traffic on the web. Facebook share buttons appear on more and more websites and people can use them to recommend their FB network about the page or site. Just look to the left of this text and you’ll see a Facebook Share-button. This buttons generate huge amounts of traffic as we rely more and more on recommendations from our “friends” than looking for content with search engines. ReadWriteWeb in fact reports that Facebook accounts for half of social traffic on the web, and that’s a lot. This is also the reason why Google (so desperately) tries to get in on the social traffic with Google Buzz.

Now Facebook wants to know what we like. FB offers the opportunity (?) for everyone to put a LIKE-button on their website or page and apparently they are expecting massive use of the LIKE-button: 1 billion Likes within the first 24 hours of the launch of the service! But what does a LIKE-button do then? Not much. It could be seen as the least effort of participating as it doesn’t take a lot of time to just click on a button. Commenting blog entries is hard work compared to a click on a Like-button. Now why should this be so popular? Why does the Like button, or more specifically the absence of a Dislike-button raise so much discussion? Why is it so much “fun” to show others that you like something? Is it just that people are lazy, but they still want to participate somehow?

What this results in is that Facebook gathers even more data about what we do on the web, not just on Facebook but anywhere on the web. Facebook uses our clicks to show our network what we have liked, using this to generate even more social traffic to sites using the Like-button. There’s not much we can do online anymore without Facebook or Google knowing about it. They own the web and with that, they own us.

More ways to give Facebook even more information about us and those that visit our websites can be found at http://developers.facebook.com/docs/guides/web.

If you like this entry then you should click on the LIKE -button below. Don’t bother to comment, that’s too hard work and time consuming.

NB. Instructions and code on how to get a dynamic Like-button to your Wordpress powered blog can be found at http://cordobo.com/1608-facebook-like-plugin-wordpress/.

I could be, or I should be, in Wolverhampton now, maybe having a full english breakfast perhaps with a proper cider in Wetherspoons, but instead I’m at work, in Finland. I also have to break the bad news to my students: we will have lectures this week after all. I’m not in Wolverhampton due to the volcanic ash that is covering Europe. My fligth should have taken off on friday. That got cancelled. I booked another ticket for monday morning. That got cancelled. I may have to postpone my trip for a couple of weeks or months even.

However, it has been interesting to see how people are using the web to make alternative travel arrangements to get back home from where ever they are. A nice overview of different sites that have been used can be read at Teemu Arina’s blog. Facebook is filling with groups somehow related to ash clouds or arranging travels or accomodation. On Twitter there are thousands of tweets with a hashtag #ashtag, like in the image below.

And carpooling sites are filling with more or less desperate cries. There are stories about people taking taxis from Madrid to Sweden and buying used cars in France to drive to Finland. People are sharing cabins with strangers on ferries and opening their homes to strangers stranded in foreign countries. These examples and others are great examples how we today can access information that wasn’t available before. We can take part of other peoples’ stories and maybe help them, suggest some solutions to their problems. This shows how people are increasingly using easy-to-use services to share their stories and how others can take part of them, join in the discussions. Call it citizen journalism if you want, or “social media in action”.

Lately there have been some blogpostings about the amount of friends people have on Facebook. AllFacebook posted an entry about how many is too much and cited an article in New York Times according to which people with over 800 friends “are perceived as insecure”. Mashable wrote about Mark Cuban that had just crossed the magical (?) limit of 5000 friends on Facebook. I appreciate the fact that some people are collecting friends on Facebook like others collect stamps or old coins or what ever. But I can’t understand how they can cope with the News Feed on Facebook. I have left Facebook (almost completely) mostly because of the fact that my 50 friends generate such amount of News Feed that I get overloaded with information. I don’t care if someone has been bitten by a vampyre or if someone else added another useless application. And I can’t turn the News Feeds off!

Facebook has to do two things before I return to Facebook and I know they would just love to have me back . First of all, users have to have the choice to turn the news feed off or at least choose what kind of news will be posted. I was hoping that the possibility to set “likes” and “dislikes” on the news would have been a selflearning feature that would have eventueally learnt which news I want to see and which I don’t want to see, but no, at least not yet. The second thing Facebook needs to do is to redesign categorizing of friends. Current categorizing by how people know each other is not working very well. The idea is good because I might have things on my profile that I want my friends to see but that I don’t want my colleagues to see, and vice versa. But currently this feature is not working.