Facebook Testing the Want Button

redletterdave writes "Facebook already knows what you 'Like.' Soon, it may ask you what you 'Want'. Tom Waddington, a Web developer for the craft website Cut Out + Keep, discovered that Facebook has included code for a disabled 'Want' button within the Javascript of its list of social plug-ins. The code was released to the Facebook Javascript SDK last Wednesday, but Waddington discovered the disabled button among other embedded tags, including 'degrees,' 'social context' and 'page events.' Waddington says the 'Want' button would work with Open Graph projects that use the tag 'products.'"

Comments

Re:Next: "Fucked" button.

[V-similitude]

Want to fuck?

Re:More than anything in the world...

[silentcoder]

>It will. It's just another fad after all.

I'm not so sure you're right. It's already outlived every social network before it (by which I mean total lifespan from foundation to demise) - and it doesn't even seem to have peaked in users yet.
Several attempts at competition have come and gone - twice from the mighty google (and one of those arguably had a better user-experience to start with) and still it remains the behemoth of most people's online experience.

There may be more to this than just a fad. I think part of it may be in their internal approach to running the company. They seem to seriously focus on being an awesome place to work who can get the best of the best coding minds. A friend of mine was a google engineer, she just left them for facebook - she actually took a paycut to do that (granted she was with google in Zurich which is the best paid development office in the WORLD - she would take a paycut for ANY other job).
If you look at their job ads they include this choice line: "Most developers are used to weeks or months between writing code and it reaching production. At facebook, your code will be in production on the busiest website in the world within days."

Now doesn't that sound exciting ? Scary? Challenging ? The kind of thing that the true geniusses of our field love ?
Maybe, just maybe, facebook is doing well because they offer a service their users find valuable, their customers benefit from (and I am well aware that those aren't the same people) and they give their technologists the creative free reign to make magic ?