Sites in Like, Not Love, With Facebook Link
Facebook Inc. is finding new kinds of websites to “Like,” in the parlance of the popular social-networking service. But some of the sites are trying to figure out if the admiration is mutual.
Since April, the company has been trying to persuade sites to add a free “Like” button, which lets Web users show their interest in a page with one click and notify their Facebook friends about it.
As of July, 350,000 websites, most of them news, sports and publishing sites, had added what Facebook calls “social plug-ins”—of which the “Like” button is the most prominent example.
In recent weeks, a growing array of shopping sites have placed “Like” buttons on their pages, too, including those of eBay Inc., Best Buy Inc. and Gilt Groupe Inc., expanding Facebook’s influence into a $140 billion industry in the U.S. that drives both online advertising and a growing portion of retail sales.
