Facebook has announced its Facebook for Websites service the their f8 developers conference.  Along with a bunch of other services is a fairly simple little button you can add to any site called the Like Button.  It works in exactly the same way as liking something on your Facebook newsfeed, but it’s for any page on the internet. 

This is what the button looks like when it’s put onto a page:

It shows the profile picture of the person who’s viewing the page (if they’re logged into Facebook) and how many other people have liked that page. You can see an example of this on my wife’s site Pea Pilly Bean *.

If you click the Like lutton on any page, it will add a like to that page & post a message on your newsfeed that you liked that page, it looks like this:

On the Like button page on the Facebook developers site there’s a handy too that will allow you to generate the code for the button to put on your site. You can put any url in there & it will spit out code that looks like this:

<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=http%3A%2F%2Fblog.slaven.net.au%2F&amp;layout=standard&amp;show_faces=true&amp;width=450&amp;action=like&amp;colorscheme=light" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowTransparency="true" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:450px; height:px"></iframe>

You can stick this on your site & it will work.  The only problem is that it’s a fixed url.  So if you use your site’s homepage url when people click it, no matter what page or post they’re actually looking at, it will always post the link to your homepage.  This is fine, but it would be way more useful if it posted that they were liking the actual post they’re on.

Fortunately this is really easy to do.  You just need to change the code to this:

<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=<?php echo urlencode('http://'.$_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'].$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']) ?>&amp;layout=standard&amp;show_faces=true&amp;width=450&amp;action=like&amp;colorscheme=light" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowTransparency="true" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:450px; height:px"></iframe>

This will then generate a link button for the page you’re looking at, rather than for a fixed URL.  To install this either paste this code into your WordPress template somewhere, or to make it even easier install the PHP Code Widget plugin which allows you to add a widget to your sidebar that you can put PHP code into.  Then just drag the ‘PHP Code’ widget onto your sidebar in the Widgets admin section & paste the above code into it

Click ‘Save’ and you’re done.  The Like button will now show on every page, with the button referencing this page the person is looking at.

The only thing you may have to change is the ’450′ value for the width in the code.  If you want it to be narrower or wider you’ll need to change this value

I’m sure a more sophisticated solution to this will come out fairly soon, but for now this works just fine. Update: There’s now a bunch of plugins that will replicate this functionality, check the comments of this post for some examples

Just in case you didn’t know, you can see what the new Facebook profiles are going to look like here http://www.new.facebook.com/profile.php

The new layout has a lot more dependence on AJAX/Javascript and they’re clearly focusing on the news feed.  To access the application boxes & info that used to be on the profile page you need to click on one of the tabs under the person’s name.  Also the link to comment on a news item is now the word ‘Comment’ instead  of the rather ambiguous little icon it is currently.

The obvious comparison here is with FriendFeed.  The current version of Facebook doesn’t allow you to comment on items directly from the news feed, you have to go to an individual person’s profile to do that.  We can’t see whether this will be possible in the new version of Facebook because it’s not showing us the news feed yet.  When you click on the home link on the new facebook site it just reloads the profile page.  If they do allow this it will become very much a FriendFeed clone. 

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FaceBook has been slowly updating the Mini-feed displayed on a user’s profile page to look more and more like a FriendFeed-esq lifestreaming application, by allowing you to include actions from other sites, and now allowing comments on the items.

Triston McIntyre has a good post on the details and possible implications of these changes on Profy, especially as to why FriendFeed probably doesn’t have to worry too much about this:

In execution, I seriously doubt Friendfeed has anything to worry about. Though Facebook does have a friends feed on each user’s homepage, and individual mini-feeds on every user’s profile, Facebook’s feeds are structured very differently than FriendFeed. Where on FriendFeed, the feed is pretty much the focus, mini-feeds on Facebook are largely overlooked, except perhaps by those jealous lovers and "interested" others (oh, come on, everyone has them.right?).

Facebook is essentially Social 101 for those looking to get connected to friends. Platforms like FriendFeed and Twitter, at least at this point in time, are just a higher level of social media. Adoption of both platforms is increasing, but I don’t think that FriendFeed needs to worry about losing its user base to Facebook-happy comment heads. Sleep easy, FriendFeed, and enjoy the flattery by imitation.

However, Google Operating System has a post today outlining the features in the new beta of the iGoogle homepage.  The new iGoogle will have a lot more ‘social’ features in in, including a gtalk chat & gmail directly on the page, but the thing that I noticed was the ‘Updates’ box on the right.  This seems to be a feed of all the things you’re doing on Google’s products.  The box there has a number of items on it: shared items from Google Reader, photos from Picassa, shared themes for iGoogle, shared gadgets and status from Gtalk.  There’s also the ability to add free text (and presumably links) in a box above the list.  There doesn’t seem to be any non-google content in there, but I can’t believe that it would be possible to do that.  If it’s not a feature now, you know it will be very soon.

So FriendFeed may have some more competition in the not too distant future.