The Facebook like button that has been available on Firefox is now available as a Chrome extension. Apparently this has been a side project and it was launched a couple of months ago. So what is the big fuss about it now? The only reason is that Facebook launched this extension very quietly with no official announcement.
This new extension adds a “Like” button to the top right of the chrome browser next to the search box. When you have activated this extension, it also adds the option to the right-click menu allowing you like specific content such as video files, images, and audio files.
The nice thing about this is that it allows you to share interesting content whether or not the owner has included the “Like” option on the specific content. This is very good news for Facebook advertising as the web of social media has just been cast even further, allowing an easier way of employing additional Facebook marketing techniques without the need to add additional plugins to the content source to enable this.
No official announcement
Maybe the reason why Facebook didn’t officially announce this is because it might still need some development to iron out all the little gremlins. Many people have complained about this new extension on how counter intuitive it is for the button to bring up a “sub menu” where the “Like” option has to selected before the specific page and content is “Liked”.
As always, there are concerns on how Facebook will use all the data that they collect with this new Chrome extension, which will include the URL that was visited, the time, and the users IP address. Facebook has stated that all the data that they collect are anonymous, but why then collect it? In this digital age where so many people and services store large amounts of personal information within their network, it will most likely not cause too much worry for most.
If you are using chrome, will you be using this new extension?