I Like You: The Emerging Culture of Micro Acts of Appreciation with Macro Impact

• March 8, 2009
• 30 Comments

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Like is the new favorite, which was at the time, was the new bookmark. This small, but important feature will no less, reinforce relationships between friends and followers and those who produce, interact with, and share content.

Made popular by services such as FriendFeed, and now Facebook, the idea of liking an update is much bigger than merely bookmarking or favoriting (yes, it’s a new verb in the social web) updates from friends and contacts for later reference. The act of liking is quickly emerging as a simple, but complimentary gesture of acknowledgment and reciprocation to recognize the contribution of someone whom you follow.

FriendFeed

As Robert Scoble notes, FriendFeed is Facebook’s R&D; department. Recently, Facebook introduced the act of liking updates directly into the personal, and precious, News Feed a.k.a. the Statusphere.

New services and communities are also debuting based on the premise of liking. Likaholix, for example, builds a community around reciprocity and those who actively like relevant material.

Likaholix fuses bookmarking and the kindness of liking with influence. It creates a layer of “tastemakers” around those topics and fields in which users emerge as experts based on their consistent, themed contributions and activity within the network.

Liking is the epitome of the relationship-based culture powering the authenticity, ethics, and reciprocal interactions on the Social Web. It’s a powerful form of micro recognition, which serves as an approving, motivating, and uplifting nod from someone else.

Likes also offer a macro impact within social networks. The deed of liking an update resonates within and outside the social graph as those who follow your activity will now receive an introduction to something that caught your attention, thus amplifying the source post or update to span across the relevant net as well as the network of friends of friends (FoFs).

As the social Web and new services continue the migration and permeation into everything we do online, we’re endlessly faced with an increasingly thinning state of continuous partial attention (CPA). It’s affecting how and what we consume, when, and more importantly, how we react, participate and share. That “something” is forever vying for our attention and relentlessly pushing us to do more with less driven by the omnipresent fear of missing out on what’s next. However, the act of liking is a symbol for how we can still publicly appreciate updates and those behind them without carving out precious time to formally comment or bookmark them in external networks.

Source: Andreina

Likes are incredibly powerful as they facilitate the sharing of love in byte-sized actions that reverberate throughout social networks, resulting in a formidable network effect of movement or diversion. It is the digital curation of relevant content that binds us contextually. Liking sets the stage to introduce not only new content to new people, but also facilitates the forging of new friendships in the process.

How does this change how you discover and share updates and content?

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