Facebook created quite a splash with its announcements at the f8 developer conference. The new features are a bold move forward, but plenty of people were a little worried about the power Facebook was seemingly amassing. Facebook has released an overview of the conference and also several interesting numbers. The most interesting: more than 50,000 websites have already implemented the “Like” button or the other social plugins Facebook launched, in just one week after release.
“Thanks to all of you who made f8 such a great event — from the more than 1,500 attendees to the 120,000 people who joined us on f8 Live, our live stream channel,” Sandra Liu Huang, a product marketing manager at Facebook,
wrote.
“At f8, we also launched new tools called social plugins — including the Like button, Activity Feed, and Recommendations — on more than 75 websites. Already, just one week since launch, more than 50,000 sites across the Web have implemented the new plugins,” she announced.
The Like button is pretty innocuous at first sight, but the adoption rate has been much bigger than what most people expected. In a sense, it could be compared to the Digg or Twitter buttons that are all over the web, enabling you to share a link with the world. But the Like button is more than that, it is deeply integrated with your profile and helps Facebook get a very accurate reading on the type of stuff you are interested in.
Facebook Connect is widely considered a great success for Facebook, enabling users to log in and connect with the social network from any site. But Connect has ‘only’ been implemented by 250,000 sites, in more than a year since its inception. With the Like button, users don’t even have to log in anymore, they are always connected to Facebook. And to give you an idea of how big the Like button is already, it was seen one billion times in the first 24 hours since it was introduced.
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