One of These Days

A look down my Facebook news feed shows me things like “Steve likes ‘I wish i was little again, when the hardest choice was picking a crayon’ ”. Other than liking people’s business pages, or events, or photos, people are starting to like sentences.

It turns out there are websites dedicated to listing sentences and phrases that people can ‘like’, with the release of Facebook’s new Open Graph API.

One example is superlike. Another is chelick

Instead of updating my Facebook status, I can ‘like’ a series of phrases that other people have said. Due to Facebook’s new settings, these likes will be publicly available.

We are so used to relying on content on the web, that the act of liking even everyday phrases and comments is becoming popular. While it existed before with the many Facebook pages that were available, now it is even simpler. This is similar to re-tweeting on twitter, in a way, except the phrases you ‘like’ are listed anonymously so you are not celebrating what a person has said, just the content of it.

Will the next step be personality archetypes that we subscribe to, which automatically publish content in line with what we would say? It’s an extreme example, and not likely, I simply find it interesting to watch the trends that appear on social networks.