“Dislike” it or not, Facebook wants to know what you feel

I was invited yesterday by Spanish state television company RTVE to give my opinion about Facebook’s alleged plans to introduce a “Dislike” button,revealed by none other than Mark Zuckerberg himself. The news item and my comments can be seen on RTVE’s web at minute 44.01 (in Spanish).

The huge response to Zuckerberg’s comments, made at a Q&A session at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California highlights the role that this company plays in public and private life: a page that started out as a place to find out what our friends and family were up to, to see a bunch of birthday photos, is today the place where more and more people now interact, form opinions and inform themselves.

The “Like” button was launched as an immediate way of showing approval about something. Of course it was always possible to express the same sentiment through a comment, but this took longer and required some thought, preventing many people from joining in, which was a key entry barrier to a strategy based largely on using mobile devices.

At the same time, this brilliant move, which rapidly spread beyond Facebookto the rest of the internet, making the company a benchmark for the web, and of course, used even by its main rival to build its search algorithm. The “Like” button is a highly effective way of providing information about our interests and preferences over time, much faster that counting the number of incoming links.

Of course the problem with the “Like” button is that it’s not very versatile. In the case of news items with what we might call negative connotations, such as a catastrophe or a comment about the death of your pet, “Like” is perhaps not the most appropriate way to share your feelings: “What, you like the fact that my cat has died?” Which is why Facebook is now thinking about other ways to express empathy, support, and other feelings with greater subtlety than “Like”, but without actually being able to say something negative.

I think we can safely say that Facebook isn’t about to introduce a “Dislike” button, for the simple reason that it would turn the social network into a kind of ongoing, permanent referendum, which would soon put a lot of people off participating. Being able to say “Dislike” is almost certainly not what Mark Zuckerberg was thinking of when he decided to try to increase participation in Facebook.

This is a more important point than it might at first appear. Finding the right way to increase participation is a complex and delicate task in terms of usability and interaction. We could be talking about the “Like” button simply not appearing in relation to certain types of content, with another option to express empathy based on what an algorithm decides is appropriate.

On the other hand, it might work along the lines of a box that begins with “I feel…” allowing users to either choose from a range of words, or even to write their own thoughts. The question also raises all sorts of fascinating design issues.

If you think that this is all being given too much attention, that this is frivolous, then you clearly have no understanding of the importance of Facebook in today’s world, a world in which almost 1.5 billion people around the planet now use this social network.

(En espa?ol, aquí)