Facebook Like Moves Beyond the Dumb Grunt, Adds Comments to Like Button

Facebook Like Moves Beyond the Dumb Grunt, Adds Comments to Like Button

One of the most obnoxious things about Facebook's recent changes has been that clicking a Like button around the web just pushed a dumb, inarticulate grunt out into the newsfeed of your friends. "I Like this thing," it said, and nothing more. Today that's changing, with the inclusion of a writable comment space inside the pop-up that appears when visitors Like something out around the web.

Messages sent with personal comments tend to get more click-throughs, the company said today. These messages will now also include a longer description of what's being liked. This is a great change towards making the point of intersection between Facebook and the larger web richer, more personal and less condescending.

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Update: Readers smarter than I point out in comments below that there have been other methods that enabled commenting in a Like button for some time. I stand corrected! I am also glad that it's now all the easier, including here on ReadWriteWeb.

To Like in Facebook parlance might be to show support for something, it might represent the intention of subscribing to future updates or it might be an action that a user takes solely to gain access to priviledges exclusive to a page's Fans, as they used to be called. Allowing users to post additional commentary just makes sense.

To Like an object is also to give that object's owner some access to your personal and demographic information on Facebook. Such a complex interaction is inappropriate to make as simple as it has been and adding a place for users to annotate the signals they emit into their social graphs is a logical first step.

Remember when George Bush joined Facebook, but in such a way that only people who Liked his Fan page could write comments on it? How many of you would have liked to have added a comment to the message that went out to your friends saying you Liked George Bush? I know I would have.