All Facebook: The Rise Of The Facebook Start Page

Apr 26

All Facebook: The Rise Of The Facebook Start Page

LikeButton.me is the first in a number of new start pages powered by Facebook’s social recommendation widget. The service enables you to enter in any of your favorite sites and find out what your friends (and others) are currently sharing. It illustrates the power of some of the latest features rolled out by Facebook over the past week. While this was a simple test by Zach Allia, he’s continued building out the service and has new features coming later tonight.

The site, which resembles classic start pages like Netvibes and Pageflakes, is extremely straight-forward. The difference is that the content which shows up on the site is based on a 400 million person community. Zachary Allia is also the developer behind Free Gifts, one of the first applications on the Facebook Platform which was ultimately sold to Social Gaming Network before the company shifted its focus to developing iPhone games.

While a number of startpages are beginning to sprout up, like ItsTrending, likebutton.me is the first of its kind. The greater question is whether or not Facebook will provide more details about like trends in the future. We previously theorized about a public like stream and while Facebook has yet to release such a service, we still believe in the power of a public like stream. One of the primary rationales behind a public like stream would be for Facebook to compete directly with Twitter when it comes to an open stream of links.

Despite the theoretical possibilities of tomorrow LikeButton.me serves as a reminder of the power of Facebook’s new like system. While LikeButton.me will most definitely face fierce competition to try and become the start page of tomorrow, the concept is solid and if the site can evolve with the new “Like” features provided by Facebook it may have staying power.

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