My better half Rachel outlined a problem to me yesterday, which I hadn't noticed before and could be something of an interesting challenge; the case of the ambiguous 'like'.
Here's the setup, a blog post which is a review of a new music album, the post has the familiar facebook 'like' button on there.
Here's the problem, my partner finds that people will only click the 'like' button if they 'like' the album, it's not about the post, the site, the quality of the writing in the review. All points to something wrong in the kudos chain.
It's not just like though, let's introduce a simple '5 Star' rating system on the posts, just what are the users rating, the post, or the album?
Now, let's change the example somewhat, scenario: a well write article about a horrific genocide - hundreds of people saying 'I Like this', as humans we can quickly infer (and somewhat hope) that people are saying they like the article, and not the genocide, but what about a machine.
For your consideration, each web page typically includes multiple distinct things, so we need a way to be able provide users with a way to do 'stuff' which each thing, I like this review, I like this author, this topic is worth noting, I like the primary topic, I've read this and so forth - any semantic web readers will quickly say "ahh problem solved! give everything a URI" (I hope) - but the problem isn't solved, it brings up (yet again) the issue that we need a whole new generation of UX/UI improvements, one 'like' button will not do, when you've got 10-100 things on a page, and different actions for each, this is something that's clearly going to have to be abstracted out from the page and handled in a different way - just how I don't know..
Will leave it there, you can see the challenge..
I like this, this comment box I meant.
http://enjoysthin.gs/ helps with this a bit, by grabbing items (e.g. videos and images) to 'like' rather than whole pages. But I agree--there's a granularity problem here.
To me, the meaning of “like” depends on context and, as you state, the context is what is hardest to determine by the current one-size-fits-all Facebook like button. Of course, Facebook is not truly interested in the context. They are simply interested in insinuating their service into as many other websites as possible, thereby making their service and brand indispensable.
How does Facebook’s OpenGraph ontology deal with the meaning of “like”? I think this would be telling. How should Semantic Web applications deal with this notion in general? What does the notion like real mean? What does it connote?
It does seem that if Facebook’s like button, or facsimiles thereof, become common place in Social Web applications, then a new ontology that describes attitudes and feelings may need to be crafted. But for this to be fruitful, the intended meaning of the person registering a “like” would have to be clearly determined. That is currently not possible or practical.
a little problem.. Just what do you like? http://bit.ly/c0DYW1
This comment was originally posted on Twitter