Latest news with #BobGoodson
Irish Times
12-06-2025
- Business
- Irish Times
How the ‘like' button was used by social media companies to turbocharge their business models
The 'like' button and its palette of variations is used about 160 million times a day globally and it is now the most widely used symbol of affirmation in the digital world. The story of how and why it quickly established this status in the noughties, how social platforms have exploited it to turbo boost their business models since and its future in the world of artificial intelligence is the subject of a fascinating new book, Like: The Button that Changed the World . Bob Goodson, co-author of the book with Martin Reeves, played an important role in the button's development. While he says that, as with most innovative breakthroughs, no one person can claim to have developed the like button single-handedly, he was one half of a two-person team at the then start-up online directory Yelp that developed the first button that allowed users to stay on the same page after clicking. Yelp, which is now a $1 billion business, was also the first to put multiple emotional buttons on a web page. Then as now, the big issue was engagement. READ MORE 'In the early years of the web, about 5 per cent of people created content and 95 per cent simply consumed it and that was a real problem for platforms who wanted to grow,' he tells The Irish Times. 'Putting content on the web in its early days was a really geeky thing to do. They were technical issues, there was dial up, joining forums, it was very male-dominated and women didn't feel safe on the internet. This was before the nice graphical interfaces were introduced and it was all text-based. Yelp and others were thinking about ways of bringing the barrier down and introducing 'likes' proved a real winner.' Today, Goodson runs a Silicon Valley-based firm, Quid, whose AI models are used by many of the top Fortune 50 companies, while Reeves is chairman of Boston Consulting Group's business strategy think-tank BCG Henderson Institute. Their book explores the psychology of likes and finds evolutionary motives. Likes boost survival chances by contributing to the friendship, communication and hierarchy that maximises social learning. We have evolved to get a buzz from liking and that applies to both giving and receiving. A positive reaction to a social-media post causes a frisson of excitement and a feel-good surge and this is the psychological territory that the like button taps into. Interestingly, it doesn't work in reverse. Pioneers who tried 'don't like' buttons soon dropped them as they found users hated them. The thumb symbol is another enduring feature of the like button and many of the variations also incorporate elements of the hand. 'We think there's something very powerful about the hand. Monks in the 14th century used to draw hands with pointing fingers in the margins of manuscripts, called manicules. People have been interested in interacting with text like this for as long as it has been written down,' Goodson notes. Liking is a form of content creation. When you click a like you are putting your mark down forever. If you are not careful, it could cost you your job — Bob Goodson Facebook 's adoption of the like button was the key development for the 'like economy' and provided a huge boost to its fortunes from 2009 onwards. Others quickly followed. As analytics became more and more powerful, like data has become a digital gold mine, allowing platforms to customise content to users and sell that user data to those wanting to reach them. The like button greases the wheels of this model and the algorithms here are the secret sauce, guarded carefully. As the authors put it: 'Your use of a platform can reveal behaviour you don't even reflect on or recognise about yourself. The timing of your activity on the site, for example, can say a lot about the typical rhythm of your day, and the emotional valence of your postings can serve as a kind of mood ring you didn't know you were wearing. Like poker players highly adept at spotting tells, the social-media platforms you use pick up on signals you're not conscious of transmitting.' Secrecy is a recurring theme. 'It's a neat trick on the part of the platforms, giving their product away for free to users without being too explicit about the fact that, in fact, those users are the product.' Not that consumers seem to be too bothered. Arguably having goods and services pitched at you isn't a problem if the algorithm is serving up things that you've told it you are actually interested in – whether you've done that consciously or unconsciously. More worryingly is the effect of likes and/or the lack of them, on the more vulnerable. Children are a particular area of concern in regard to issues such as self-esteem, Goodson acknowledges. 'Social media is a powerfully addictive thing because of the game the platforms are playing for attention, and they will use whatever works. It has created an experience that requires a lot of self-discipline and awareness to keep it healthy. There's a growing belief that children are not ready for it. We're now seeing regulation in this area, such as in Australia, which is prohibiting under-16s from using platforms. My expectation is that trend will continue and that there will need to be stronger protections and regulations for younger people.' Likes are not a trivial matter for those of any age, however, as many public figures have found to their extreme cost. 'Liking is a form of content creation. When you click a like you are putting your mark down forever. If you are not careful, it could cost you your job.' Likes are also playing an important role in the ongoing development of AI, albeit in a different way. 'There are like buttons in the chat apps. They use thumbs up and thumbs down because it won't offend the model. They want you to interact with it because it will improve performance of the large language model. It's just as important. We also think the like data that the platforms hold are very important data sets to train the models. It could be a real competitive advantage for Meta and X .' Reeves and Goodson have produced a thoughtful, well researched and easily accessible book on this subject, exploring the deep significance of what appears to be simple and intuitive feature that we take for granted, but one that in fact has a profound influence on our lives. It gets a thumbs up. Like: The Button That Changed the World, by Martin Reeves and Bob Goodson, is published by Harvard Business Review Press
Japan Today
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Japan Today
Like it or not, the Like button has changed the world
This image provided by BCG shows a sketch by Bob Goodson that included a crude concept of what would become the Like button on May 18, 2005. (BCG via AP) By MICHAEL LIEDTKE The internet wouldn't be the same without the Like button, the thumbs-up icon that Facebook and other online services turned into digital catnip. Like it or not, the button has served as a creative catalyst, a dopamine delivery system and an emotional battering ram. It also became an international tourist attraction after Facebook plastered the symbol on a giant sign that stood outside its Silicon Valley headquarters until the company rebranded itself as Meta Platforms in 2021. A new book, 'Like: The Button That Changed The World," delves into the convoluted story behind a symbol that's become both the manna and bane of a digitally driven society. It's a tale that traces back to gladiator battles for survival during the Roman Empire before fast-forwarding to the early 21st century when technology trailblazers such as Yelp co-founder Russ Simmons, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, YouTube co-founder Steve Chen, and Gmail inventor Paul Buchheit were experimenting with different ways of using the currency of recognition to prod people to post compelling content online for free. As part of that noodling, a Yelp employee named Bob Goodson sat down on May 18, 2005, and drew a crude sketch of thumbs up and thumbs down gestures as a way for people to express their opinions about restaurant reviews posted on the site. Yelp passed on adopting Goodson's suggested symbol and, instead, adopted the 'useful,' 'funny' and 'cool' buttons conceived by Simmons. But the discovery of that old sketch inspired Goodson to team up with Martin Reeves to explore how the Like button came to be in their new book. 'It's something simple and also elegant because the Like button says, 'I like you, I like your content. And I am like you. I like you because I am like you, I am part of your tribe,' ' Reeves said during an interview with The Associated Press. 'But it's very hard to answer the simple question, 'Well, who invented the Like button?' ' Although Facebook is the main reason the Like button became so ubiquitous, the company didn't invent it and almost discarded it as drivel. It took Facebook nearly two years to overcome the staunch resistance by CEO Mark Zuckerberg before finally introducing the symbol on its service on February 9, 2009 — five years after the social network's creation in a Harvard University dorm room. As happens with many innovations, the Like button was born out of necessity but it wasn't the brainchild of a single person. The concept percolated for more than a decade in Silicon Valley before Facebook finally embraced it. 'Innovation is often social and Silicon Valley was the right place for all this to happen because it has a culture of meetups, although it's less so now,' Reeves said. 'Everyone was getting together to talk about what they were working on at that time and it turned out a lot of them were working on the same stuff.' The effort to create a simple mechanism to digitally express approval or dismay sprouted from a wellspring of online services such as Yelp and YouTube whose success would hinge on their ability to post commentary or video that would help make their sites even more popular without forcing them to spend a lot of money for content. That effort required a feedback loop that wouldn't require a lot of hoops to navigate. And when Goodson was noodling around with his thumbs-up and thumbs-down gesture, it didn't come out of a vacuum. Those techniques of signaling approval and disapproval had been ushered into the 21st century zeitgeist by the Academy Award-winning movie, 'Gladiator,' where Emperor Commodus — portrayed by actor Joaquin Phoenix — used the gestures to either spare or slay combatants in the arena. But the positive feelings conjured by a thumbs up date even further back in popular culture, thanks to the 1950s-era character Fonzie played by Henry Winkler in the top-rated 1970s TV series, 'Happy Days.' The gesture later became a way of expressing delight with a program via a remote control button for the digital video recorders made by TiVO during the early 2000s. Around the same time, Hot or Not — a site that solicited feedback on the looks of people who shared photos of themselves — began playing around with ideas that helped inspire the Like button, based on the book's research. Others that contributed to the pool of helpful ideas included the pioneering news service Digg, the blogging platform Xanga, YouTube and another early video site, Vimeo. But Facebook unquestionably turned the Like button into a universally understood symbol, while also profiting the most from its entrance into the mainstream. And it almost didn't happen. By 2007, Facebook engineers had been tinkering with a Like button, but Zuckerberg opposed it because he feared the social network was already getting too cluttered and, Reeves said, 'he didn't actually want to do something that would be seen as trivial, that would cheapen the service.' But FriendFeed, a rival social network created by Buchheit and now OpenAI Chairman Bret Taylor, had no such qualms, and unveiled its own Like button in October 2007. But the button wasn't successful enough to keep the lights on at FriendFeed, and the service ended up being acquired by Facebook. By the time that deal was completed, Facebook had already introduced a Like button — only after Zuckerberg rebuffed the original idea of calling it an Awesome button 'because nothing is more awesome than awesome,' according to the book's research. Once Zuckerberg relented, Facebook quickly saw that the Like button not only helped keep its audience engaged on its social network but also made it easier to divine people's individual interests and gather the insights required to sell the targeted advertising that accounted for most of Meta Platform's $165 billion in revenue last year. The button's success encouraged Facebook to take things even further by allowing other digital services to ingrain it into their feedback loops and then, in 2016, added six more types of emotions — 'love,' 'care,' 'haha,' 'wow,' 'sad,' and 'angry.' Facebook hasn't publicly disclosed how many responses it has accumulated from the Like button and its other related options, but Levchin told the book's authors that he believes the company has probably logged trillions of them. 'What content is liked by probably one of the singularly most valuable things on the internet,' Levchin said in the book. The Like button also has created an epidemic of emotional problems, especially among adolescents, who feel forlorn if their posts are ignored and narcissists whose egos feast on the positive feedback. Reeves views those issues as part of the unintentional consequences that inevitably happen because 'if you can't even predict the beneficial effects of a technological innovation how could you possibly forecast the side effects and the interventions?' Even so, Reeves believes the Like button and the forces that coalesced to create it tapped into something uniquely human. 'We thought serendipity of the innovation was part of the point,' Reeves said. 'And I don't think we can get bored with liking or having our capacity to compliment taken away so easily because it's the product of 100,000 years of evolution.' © Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
Fast Company
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Fast Company
Who invented Facebook's Like button? It's complicated, say the authors of this new book
The internet wouldn't be the same without the Like button, the thumbs-up icon that Facebook and other online services turned into digital catnip. Like it or not, the button has served as a creative catalyst, a dopamine delivery system and an emotional battering ram. It also became an international tourist attraction after Facebook plastered the symbol on a giant sign on that stood outside its Silicon Valley headquarters until the company rebranded itself as Meta Platforms in 2021. A new book, 'Like: The Button That Changed The World,' delves into the convoluted story behind a symbol that's become both the manna and bane of a digitally driven society. It's a tale that traces back to gladiator battles for survival during the Roman empire before fast-forwarding to the early 21st century when technology trailblazers such as Yelp co-founder Russ Simmons, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, YouTube co-founder Steve Chen, and Gmail inventor Paul Buchheit were experimenting with different ways using the currency of recognition to prod people to post compelling content online for free. As part of that noodling, a Yelp employee named Bob Goodson sat down on May 18, 2005, and drew a crude sketch of thumbs up and thumbs down gesture as a way for people to express their opinions about restaurant reviews posted on the site. Yelp passed on adopting Goodson's suggested symbol and, instead, adopted the 'useful,' 'funny' and 'cool' buttons conceived by Simmons. But the discovery of that old sketch inspired Goodson to team up with Martin Reeves to explore how the Like button came to be in their new book. 'It's something simple and also elegant because the Like button says, 'I like you, I like your content. And I am like you. I like you because I am like you, I am part of your tribe,' ' Reeves said during an interview with The Associated Press. 'But it's very hard to answer the simple question, 'Well, who invented the Like button?' ' The social wellspring behind a social symbol Although Facebook is the main reason the Like button became so ubiquitous, the company didn't invent it and almost discarded it as drivel. It took Facebook nearly two years to overcome the staunch resistance by CEO Mark Zuckerberg before finally introducing the symbol on its service on February 9, 2009 — five years after the social network's creation in a Harvard University dorm room. As happens with many innovations, the Like button was born out of necessity but it wasn't the brainchild of a single person. The concept percolated for more than a decade in a Silicon Valley before Facebook finally embraced it. 'Innovation is often social and Silicon Valley was the right place for all this happen because it has a culture of meet-ups, although it's less so now,' Reeves said. 'Everyone was getting together to talk about what they were working on at that time and it turned out a lot of them were working on the same stuff.' The effort to create a simple mechanism to digitally express approval or dismay sprouted from a wellspring of online services such as Yelp and YouTube whose success would hinge on their ability to post commentary or video that would help make their sites even more popular without forcing them to spend a lot of money for content. That effort required a feedback loop that wouldn't require a lot of hoops to navigate. Hollywood's role in the Like button's saga And when Goodson was noodling around with his thumbs-up and thumbs-down gesture, it didn't come out of a vacuum. Those techniques of signaling approval and disapproval had been ushered into the 21st century zeitgeist by the Academy Award-winning movie, 'Gladiator,' where Emperor Commodus — portrayed by actor Joaquin Phoenix — used the gestures to either spare or slay combatants in the arena. But the positive feelings conjured by a thumbs up date even further back in popular culture, thanks to the 1950s-era character Fonzie played by Henry Winkler in the top-rated 1970s TV series, 'Happy Days.' The gesture later became a way of expressing delight with a program via a remote control button for the digital video recorders made by TiVO during the early 2000s. Around the same time, Hot or Not — a site that solicited feedback on the looks of people who shared photos of themselves — began playing around with ideas that helped inspire the Like button, based on the book's research. Others that contributed to the pool of helpful ideas included the pioneering news service Digg, the blogging platform Xanga, YouTube and another early video site, Vimeo. The button's big breakthrough But Facebook unquestionably turned the Like button into a universally understood symbol, while also profiting the most from its entrance into the mainstream. And it almost didn't happen. By 2007, Facebook engineers had been tinkering with a Like button, but Zuckerberg opposed it because he feared the social network was already getting too cluttered and, Reeves said, 'is he didn't actually want to do something that would be seen as trivial, that would cheapen the service.' But FriendFeed, a rival social network created by Buchheit and now OpenAI Chairman Bret Taylor, had no such qualms, and unveiled its own Like button in October 2007. But the button wasn't successful enough to keep the lights on at FriendFeed, and the service ended up being acquired by Facebook. By the time that deal was completed, Facebook had already introduced a Like button — only after Zuckerberg rebuffed the original idea of calling it an Awesome button 'because nothing is more awesome than awesome,' according to the book's research. Once Zuckerberg relented, Facebook quickly saw that the Like button not only helped keep its audience engaged on its social network but also made it easier to divine people's individual interests and gather the insights required to sell the targeted advertising that accounted for most of Meta Platform's $165 billion in revenue last year. The button's success encouraged Facebook to take things even further by allowing other digital services to ingrain it into their feedback loops and then, in 2016, added six more types of emotions — 'love,' 'care,' 'haha,' 'wow,' 'sad,' and 'angry.' Facebook hasn't publicly disclosed how many responses it has accumulated from the Like button and its other related options, but Levchin told the book's authors that he believes the company has probably logged trillions of them. 'What content is liked by humans…is probably one of the singularly most valuable things on the internet,' Levchin said in the book. The Like button also has created an epidemic of emotional problems, especially among adolescents, who feel forlorn if their posts are ignored and narcissists whose egos feast on the positive feedback. Reeves views those issues as part of the unintentional consequences that inevitably happen because 'if you can't even predict the beneficial effects of a technological innovation how could you possibly forecast the side effects and the interventions?' Even so, Reeves believes the Like button and the forces that coalesced to create it tapped into something uniquely human. 'We thought serendipity of the innovation was part of the point,' Reeves said. 'And I don't think we can get bored with liking or having our capacity to compliment taken away so easily because it's the product of 100,000 years of evolution.' —Michael Liedtke, AP Technology Writer
The Independent
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Here's a story about the history of the Like button that you might like
The internet wouldn't be the same without the Like button, the thumbs-up icon that Facebook and other online services turned into digital catnip. Like it or not, the button has served as a creative catalyst, a dopamine delivery system and an emotional battering ram. It also became an international tourist attraction after Facebook plastered the symbol on a giant sign on that stood outside its Silicon Valley headquarters until the company rebranded itself as Meta Platforms in 2021. A new book, 'Like: The Button That Changed The World," delves into the convoluted story behind a symbol that's become both the manna and bane of a digitally driven society. It's a tale that traces back to gladiator battles for survival during the Roman empire before fast-forwarding to the early 21st century when technology trailblazers such as Yelp co-founder Russ Simmons, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, YouTube co-founder Steve Chen, and Gmail inventor Paul Buchheit were experimenting with different ways using the currency of recognition to prod people to post compelling content online for free. As part of that noodling, a Yelp employee named Bob Goodson sat down on May 18, 2005, and drew a crude sketch of thumbs up and thumbs down gesture as a way for people to express their opinions about restaurant reviews posted on the site. Yelp passed on adopting Goodson's suggested symbol and, instead, adopted the 'useful,' 'funny' and 'cool' buttons conceived by Simmons. But the discovery of that old sketch inspired Goodson to team up with Martin Reeves to explore how the Like button came to be in their new book. 'It's something simple and also elegant because the Like button says, 'I like you, I like your content. And I am like you. I like you because I am like you, I am part of your tribe,' ' Reeves said during an interview with The Associated Press. 'But it's very hard to answer the simple question, 'Well, who invented the Like button?' ' The social wellspring behind a social symbol Although Facebook is the main reason the Like button became so ubiquitous, the company didn't invent it and almost discarded it as drivel. It took Facebook nearly two years to overcome the staunch resistance by CEO Mark Zuckerberg before finally introducing the symbol on its service on February 9, 2009 — five years after the social network's creation in a Harvard University dorm room. As happens with many innovations, the Like button was born out of necessity but it wasn't the brainchild of a single person. The concept percolated for more than a decade in a Silicon Valley before Facebook finally embraced it. 'Innovation is often social and Silicon Valley was the right place for all this happen because it has a culture of meet-ups, although it's less so now,' Reeves said. 'Everyone was getting together to talk about what they were working on at that time and it turned out a lot of them were working on the same stuff.' The effort to create a simple mechanism to digitally express approval or dismay sprouted from a wellspring of online services such as Yelp and YouTube whose success would hinge on their ability to post commentary or video that would help make their sites even more popular without forcing them to spend a lot of money for content. That effort required a feedback loop that wouldn't require a lot of hoops to navigate. Hollywood 's role in the Like button's saga And when Goodson was noodling around with his thumbs-up and thumbs-down gesture, it didn't come out of a vacuum. Those techniques of signaling approval and disapproval had been ushered into the 21st century zeitgeist by the Academy Award-winning movie, 'Gladiator,' where Emperor Commodus — portrayed by actor Joaquin Phoenix — used the gestures to either spare or slay combatants in the arena. But the positive feelings conjured by a thumbs up date even further back in popular culture, thanks to the 1950s-era character Fonzie played by Henry Winkler in the top-rated 1970s TV series, 'Happy Days.' The gesture later became a way of expressing delight with a program via a remote control button for the digital video recorders made by TiVO during the early 2000s. Around the same time, Hot or Not — a site that solicited feedback on the looks of people who shared photos of themselves — began playing around with ideas that helped inspire the Like button, based on the book's research. Others that contributed to the pool of helpful ideas included the pioneering news service Digg, the blogging platform Xanga, YouTube and another early video site, Vimeo. The button's big breakthrough But Facebook unquestionably turned the Like button into a universally understood symbol, while also profiting the most from its entrance into the mainstream. And it almost didn't happen. By 2007, Facebook engineers had been tinkering with a Like button, but Zuckerberg opposed it because he feared the social network was already getting too cluttered and, Reeves said, 'is he didn't actually want to do something that would be seen as trivial, that would cheapen the service.' But FriendFeed, a rival social network created by Buchheit and now OpenAI Chairman Bret Taylor, had no such qualms, and unveiled its own Like button in October 2007. But the button wasn't successful enough to keep the lights on at FriendFeed, and the service ended up being acquired by Facebook. By the time that deal was completed, Facebook had already introduced a Like button — only after Zuckerberg rebuffed the original idea of calling it an Awesome button 'because nothing is more awesome than awesome,' according to the book's research. Once Zuckerberg relented, Facebook quickly saw that the Like button not only helped keep its audience engaged on its social network but also made it easier to divine people's individual interests and gather the insights required to sell the targeted advertising that accounted for most of Meta Platform's $165 billion in revenue last year. The button's success encouraged Facebook to take things even further by allowing other digital services to ingrain it into their feedback loops and then, in 2016, added six more types of emotions — 'love,' 'care,' 'haha,' 'wow,' 'sad,' and 'angry.' Facebook hasn't publicly disclosed how many responses it has accumulated from the Like button and its other related options, but Levchin told the book's authors that he believes the company has probably logged trillions of them. 'What content is liked by probably one of the singularly most valuable things on the internet,' Levchin said in the book. The Like button also has created an epidemic of emotional problems, especially among adolescents, who feel forlorn if their posts are ignored and narcissists whose egos feast on the positive feedback. Reeves views those issues as part of the unintentional consequences that inevitably happen because 'if you can't even predict the beneficial effects of a technological innovation how could you possibly forecast the side effects and the interventions?' Even so, Reeves believes the Like button and the forces that coalesced to create it tapped into something uniquely human. 'We thought serendipity of the innovation was part of the point,' Reeves said. 'And I don't think we can get bored with liking or having our capacity to compliment taken away so easily because it's the product of 100,000 years of evolution.'
Harvard Business Review
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Harvard Business Review
Like: The Button That Changed the World
A riveting, insider's look at the creation and evolution of the like button and what it reveals about innovation, business, and culture--and its profound impact on modern human interaction. Over seven billion times a day, someone taps a like button. How could something that came out of nowhere become so ubiquitous--and even so addictive? How did this seemingly ordinary social media icon go from such a small and unassuming invention to something so intuitive and universally understood that it has scaled well beyond its original intent? This is the story of the like button and how it changed our lives. In Like, bestselling author and renowned strategy expert Martin Reeves and coauthor Bob Goodson--Silicon Valley veteran and one of the originators of the like button--take readers on a quest to uncover the origins of the thumbs-up gesture, how it became an icon on social media, and what's behind its power. Through insights from key players, including the founders of Yelp, PayPal, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Gmail, and FriendFeed, you'll hear firsthand the disorderly, serendipitous process from which the like button was born. It's a story that starts with a simple thumbs-up cartoon but ends up with surprises and new mysteries at every turn, some of them as deep as anthropological history and others as speculative as the AI-charged future. But this is much more than the origin story of the like button. Drawing on business and innovation theory, evolutionary biology, social psychology, neuroscience, and other human-centered disciplines, this deeply researched book offers smart and unexpected insights into how this little icon changed our world--and all of us in the process.
