Facebook Add ‘Read’, ‘Listened’, ‘Watched’ and ‘Wanted’ Button?

Right before Facebook’s f8 Developer Conference, Thursday, rumors about what the company will announce have been posted on almost every tech news website. The fuel added to the fire of speculation right now is a post by TechCrunch that Facebook will add new feedback buttons to stories in the news feed.

The buttons are ‘Read’, ‘Listened’, ‘Watched’ according to TechCrunch who also added, It’s important to qualify that this is from a source (and not from Facebook). It will be a match with the tagline of the f8 conference “Read, Watch, Listen”.

The idea comes from a concept called granularity to the all-purpose Like button. Imagine that your friend recommend a song to you. Instead of informing him you ‘Like’ it, you can specifically tell him you have already listened, although whether you listen or not can sometimes be something just between you and your chosen deity.

On the other hand, clicking one of these buttons actually tell Facebook that you have already consumed a piece of content. This will help Facebook refine the news feed to show you more of similar types of content based on the information it collected about how you are related to different types of content.

In addition, there could be a ‘Want’ button as in the social commerce websites. It seems that the introduction of all these buttons can be a huge opportunity for ad targeting. It is beneficial for the advertisers in a sense that they will now know what you did with the content you liked, instead of just knowing you ‘like’ something. Meanwhile, users receive more personalized experience after companies gain more segmented data from the buttons through this process.

The homepage of Facebook certainly has room for more buttons or links, and so does the rest of the site, for that matter. However, so far no Facebook employee has confirmed the informal source of TechCrunch that claimed this launch. We will have to wait for tomorrow’s f8 conference.