Skatter Tech

A few months ago, Facebook began pushing developers to switch over from the famous share button to the even more iconic like button. Having two overlapping features was confusing for many users and unifying the two technologies was the way to go. Traditionally, the like button only displayed a one-line message on your profile when pressed. Today, it publishes more details such as an excerpt and a thumbnail. Users can even share a comment as it gets published.

Facebook even did away with “fan a page” and replaced it with the like button a few months ago. The consistency is great, but today the company introduced a new send button, which provides additional functionality. While liking something on the web currently makes your click visible to all your friends, this new feature targets sharing information with specific people.

More than anything, it looks like Facebook is trying to replace traditional email links. Since Facebook keeps users logged in at all times by storing cookies in their browsers, this plugin for websites makes it possible to send links to friends without having to leave the page. A little drop down menu features a “send to” field which auto-populates the names of friends as you begin typing.

This saves users the hassle of having to open a desktop client to email a link. It also makes sharing information with specific people faster on Facebook since you can send details directly to a person without having to copy a link, switch tabs, then paste information.

Websites that already offer the like button can tweak just a line to offer a send button for visitors as well. For now, Skatter Tech will not offer the feature since it is too early to tell how well it will play with users. However, we may choose to offer this at some point in the future. I strongly feel that integrating this into the like button for an all-in-one solution would be the best way to go.

Links: Facebook | Developer Guide