So how do you use your "likes" "favorites" "+1" "digs" etc.

The social apps today want us to  “interact” with them by encouraging us  to click on a button labelled “dig”, “+1”, “like” “favorite” etc.

Clicking on them is beneficial to at least 2 of the 3 parties involved.

Poster :
   - It increases his/her “social influence”
   - It validates the “social graph”
   - “Retweeting/Reposting” can increase the traffic which could lead to increasing ad revenue
   - Provides ego boost

Service Provider
    - Helps profile the person interacting based on context information of the link/post
    - Marketing the social profile to its consumer or targeting ads/marketing campaign/research etc
    - Helps profile the poster by examining the social network
    - Help gauge the social acceptance of the topics/things discussed in the post

Clicker
    Its kinda hard to come up with the reasons on how clicking on “like”/+1/favorite helps the clicker. here is what I could come up with
    - Makes him/her socially relevant
    - Might “believe” in getting profiled in order to see more relevant ads etc.

How I want to use the “like” button (just like I use the favorite button on twitter)

Today I get majority of my tech news via twitter and social news via Facebook. Most of the news items in both of my streams are interesting links to other websites/videos etc. Thus for me Facebook & twitter stream  largely define the slice of web I surf. The problem with both of them is that they are a non stop stream of information which is almost like drinking from a fire-hose. If I do not have the time to follow the link posted, chances are that the link along with the post will fade away from my stream within hours. The “half life” of a link shared in a social media is just a few hours.

Thus if I am trading my privacy by clicking on a link, I expect this in return :

I want the service provider to provide me with the history of all the links I have interacted with. Thus I can go back and preview them at leisure. Twitter does this already and I use it extensively, both on my macbook & my iPhone. I check twitter often and “favorite” the posts catch my eye and then later in the evening or week when I have time I read the linked post/watch the video what ever. This is not possible on Facebook unfortunately, so I use service like read it later. using a browser plugin makes it easy, but still is not seemless. Also as its not supported natively, and doesn’t work on my mobile phone where I do most of my facebooking.



Hopefully Facebook will see value in making it available to us and not just the paying customters!