First I was very excited when I saw the new Facebook Like Button. But when I checked the code to see how it works, I noticed that this button actually allows Facebook to track all the Facebook users on your site, no matter if they click it or not (see my previous post on how this works).
As a publisher, you might not want to annoy the visitors of your site with that. So I hacked together an alternative like button, that only connects to Facebook if you click it. Once you have clicked it, it looks and behaves the same as the original button (actually, it’s replaced by the original button when you click it). This way users can decide if they want to let Facebook know that they have visited your site. Try it here:
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How Facebook’s Like Button Works
Facebook has introduced a new Like Button together with some other “social plugins” at their f8 conference last week. Everybody can put it on their website so that visitors can “like” a page and add it to their Facebook profile without leaving the site.
This button actually allows Facebook to track all visitors of the external site, no matter if they click it or not (as long as they are Facebook users – but who isn’t?). Facebook can do that because they use an iframe to display the button. An iframe is something like an embedded browser window within a page. The difference between using an iframe and a simple image for the button is that the iframe contains a complete web page – from Facebook. read more…