For sometime we’ve been hearing about Facebook Share button slowly going away, as Facebook itself keeps recommending developers to use the Like button instead, which is a better solution to share content without being disruptive, and it engages a better connection between the user and content. Now Facebook is introducing the Send button that brings back some features of the Share button, but incorporating some of the simplicity of the Like button — in other words, a new redesigned Share button –.
A brief story of how the Send button came to be:
If you remember, in the past, there were not too many options to share content with specific group of people, i.e., family, coworkers, friends, etc. This was an issue for Facebook until there came out Groups to alleviate the problem, and now users were able to create groups to share content more privately and easily. In less that a year millions of groups were created, noticing that users were adopting the feature pretty well, the Facebook team decided to enhance the functionality of Groups by creating the Send button to make it easier to share content with one friend or with a specific group of people.
The new Facebook Send button it is pretty identical in designed to the Like button, but once you click it a pop-up from Facebook will appear, letting you send content to a friend, to a group of poeple or to anyone using an email address; you can also add some text before send it out.
If you have a Website I know what you might be thinking, that the Like counts may go down because people now have another choice, right? Well, you should not worry since every Send counts toward the total count of Likes for a particular page.
Many well-known Websites are already implementing the new Facebook Send button, among all of them you have: Orbitz, The Wall Street Journal, Last.fm and People.com. You can add the Send button to a Web page by itself or by combining the Like and Send together. However there is a little problem, and that is that the combined Like and Send button option, for now, is only available if you are using the XFBML code, which is not a great news for those that opted to use the iFrame version of the code. To get a Send button from Facebook follow this link to the developer’s page.
The video below details a little more about the Send button:
Be the first and tell us what do you think about it in the comments section below.
Apr. 30, 2011 Update
The combined Like and Send button are now available for XFBML as well as iFrame. Get your now!
