Facebook's new Like button

The WSJ and other media reported today on the new Like tool that Facebook will propogate across the web so their users can tag content and products of interest and associate them with their Facebook profile. The tool offers a simple way for friends to share their interests and at the same time goes a step further in enabling people to 'define' themselves online via their interests, purchases and opinions.

Initially this additional data will facilitate deeper user profiling and more targeted advertising. However, by extension it will enable Facebook to map not only social networks but news, products and culture across the web and most importantly how content relates to and is valued by social networks and users (beyond Google's 'mechanical' link and content analysis).

Sites such as Yelp can provide product and service recommendations, Amazon offers product recomendations based on navigation and purchases and others such as Kosmix do a reasonable job of pulling together content around a topic. However, for the past year I have been wondering when Facebook or Google would make it easier to browse the web around a topic or interest to discover new brands, authors, bands etc.

Theoretically Google should be able to do this based on navigation data, link and content analysis but Facebook has stepped in to leverage personal recomendations and potentially encroach upon Google's role of connecting us to world's information.

Yahoo and other search engines started with reviewers attempting to classify the Internet; Facebook may be able to outsource this to 400m users worldwide and challenge Google on its own turf.