May 10
11
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been playing, as we all have, with the new Facebook social plug-ins across the Web, and I’ve come across a problem. It’s an organizational problem, and as some of you know, I have more than mild obsessive compulsive disorder, so the fact that I haven’t been able to find a reasonable explanation for why the Graph was designed like this has really been bothering me.
This now-omnipresent “like” button doesn’t change in appearance from place to place on the Web, but it seems to perform more than one task as it relates to my Facebook profile. The first, and coolest, thing that may result from me “liking” something is that it will show me on the page as “liking” that social object, along with other friends of mine who have done the same. Additionally, it will throw that thing onto my Facebook profile under Movies, Interests, etc.
For example, I “liked” the Peter Sellers movie “Being There” on IMDB (part of the group of test sites for the Open Graph), and this was the result:
But what’s that directly to the left of “Being There – 1979″? It’s The Community Page for the movie “Being There” on Facebook. When you click the Interest that was dynamically inserted from IMDB, it takes you to the IMDB page for “Being There,” but if you already had the movie as a favorite before f8, or added it after, then you will have two movies with the same title in your Movies section, and they will go to different places (one elsewhere on Facebook and one to IMDB).
To me, this is a bad consumer experience; yes, I like the movie, it was already in my Movies section before f8. Now I stumble upon the “like” button on IMDB, and I don’t see myself as “liking” the movie there. Of course, I want my friends to know that it’s a favorite movie of mine, so I hit the “like” button, and now I have duplicate links in my Movies section on my Facebook profile. There has to be a more integrated solution – isn’t that what this whole Open Graph is supposed to provide?
Another place that I hit the “like” button was in foursquare on the page for the Schuylkill River Park; I play basketball there and just in general love the vibe there. Now this same “like” button is performing a third action. It’s just counting how many people “like” that location. It’s not going onto my profile under interests (why not?), it isn’t showing me which people “like” the Schuylkill River Park within the foursquare interface, but it is showing up under my Recent Activity that throws me back to the foursquare page:
This is an OCD nightmare. The “like” button can’t look identical, be used in a sentence identically, but still do several different things to my profile at the same time, including creating Interest duplicates. Am I crazy??
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