It's Facebook official: Facebook wants to dominate Web communication and be your go-to service for sharing content all across the Web. One can easily deduce this from the features Facebook is rolling out this week.
If social networking giant gets its way, for example, "Send" will soon enter our popular culture lexicon as shorthand for sharing Web content with friends, not just mailing letters or zapping off emails.
Facebook this week announced its latest communication feature, the Facebook Send button, which is rolling out on the sprawling social network and more than 50 other sites across the Web, including People Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, Orbitz and Last.fm. The Send button lets people share links to Web content with any individuals or Facebook groups through private messages, a more selective sharing feature than the ubiquitous Facebook Like button allows.
Facebook also rolled out new features for its six-month-old Facebook Groups, including photo albums and better controls for group owners to manage memberships.
What is Facebook Send?
The Facebook Send button is a more private version of the Facebook Like button. It lets people send a Web link and accompanying message to individual Facebook friends, groups or particular e-mail addresses. The Like button, by contrast, is more public because it shares content with all your Facebook friends, not just the ones you choose.
As with Facebook Like buttons, Facebook Send is available for any website to implement on its pages through the Facebook Connect social plug-in for Send, another feature of the Facebook Platform. It involves taking a few lines of code to install the Send social plug-in widget onto any website.
Developers can choose to install Facebook Send as a standalone button on their websites or side-by-side with the Facebook Like button.
Whereas the Facebook Like button has a thumbs-up icon, the Facebook Send buttons have a tiny chat box icon, denoting it is a messaging function. Send basically aims to replace the old "email to a friend" button.
If it catches on, the Facebook Send button could have a significant impact on Facebook's growing prevalence.
Internally, it could boost usage of its private messaging system, because Facebook Send messages are transmitted to user's Facebook inboxes.
Externally, it could increase the amount of links to other Web content that get shared back on the Facebook network, thus extending Facebook's usage far beyond the social network's own site.
And that, of course, appears to be a key goal of Facebook Send, to help Facebook move beyond creating just a "book" of your friends to a "book" of your wider Web world, one that integrates content you like online with your social circle. It it succeeds in increasing your usage of Facebook, of course, that would allow the social network to make more money selling ads.
Already, the Facebook drive to connect its personalized trove of data to the wider Web is raising privacy hackles. Wired.com compares some of Facebook's social plugin efforts to connect with other Websites to "Google's creepy Web History" feature, which tracks people's Web travels and asks whether you are using Facebook or Facebook is using you.
Google, meantime, has been trying to copy some of Facebook's moves. It rolled out a "+1" button, standing for "plus one," its own version of the Facebook Like button last month. It places the +1 icon next to search results that have been tweeted or drawn other social media comments, and effectively allows you to cast a vote of approval.
But since Google doesn't have as many people using its social media profiles as Facebook, it's hard to see how "+1" can catch on as easily as any sharing features that Facebook rolls out.
Facebook face implementation challenges of its own, too. One big one may be that it keeps adding complexity and choices that could confuse people and make them unsure what to click. Already, it can be hard to know what exactly is being shared where when you click some buttons.
The existing Share button, for example, makes people choose between clicking "share," "send as a message and "post to profile." Developers can choose to rename Like buttons as Recommend buttons. At some point, all this verbiage gets confusing.