The Dublin Web Summit has their third event coming up in June and based on the previous two events it’s going to be very interesting.  My business partner Bill Liao (Co-Founder of the business networking site Xing) is speaking at it and he’s a very interesting speaker (he’ll be doing a couple of blog posts coming up to it on this blog).

Anyway, I see on the Dublin Web Summit home page they have implemented the new facebook ‘like’ functionality. Previously in facebook you became a fan of a business page but facebook felt that becoming a fan was bit heavier than just liking a brand so they changed become a fan to ‘Like’.  So now you have people that like your brand.  However, this functionality has also expanded because you can now put the ‘like’ option on a piece of content on the web, for example on your website.

On Dublin Web Summit’s website on the home page you can click on like on the front page.  When you click on like this gets published to facebook so your firiends see that you like this content. So this is a great way of getting the word out about something that’s important to your business.  In this case you want to promote the web summit.

What facebook also does is personalise this information.  If you look at the picture above it says that Ian Cleary, Sally Hudson and 45 others like this.  It identifies Sally Hudson as she is a friend on facebook.  So you look at this page you may see different people, unless your friends are the same as mine!

This is part of Facebook’s efforts to spread across the web.   ‘Liking’ something doesn’t sound as much a commitment as becoming a fan although it will have the same effect.  So from a business page point of view it’s likely to increase the number of fans (likes) and liking a piece of content anywhere on the web will start appearing within facebook.  Take a look at Likebutton.me.  This will show you what your friends are liking, cool!

When you click on ‘Like’ this it gets placed onto your wall and some of your friends see you like it.

Expect to see ‘Like’ button appearing all over the place on the web.  Click Like using the button below to see how it works!!