(Image source: jillianney.com )

BY EVAN THOMAS

ANCHOR LOGAN TITTLE

Do you like sharing likes? You’re in luck. Facebook’s like button is headed to mobile apps , as part of the social network’s ongoing drive to let users express their passing enthusiasm for anything from anywhere.

Developers will be able to add like functionality wherever it works best, as Foursquare and Instagram have done. Thanks to the power of Open Graph, mobile app likes will show up as notifications for the originators of content, and as items in the liker’s news feed.

It could mean a deluge of new content and updates to sort through. But Facebook is being careful to let users have control over what goes where. PC Magazine explains .


“On the privacy front, users will have to authorize the apps to publish their activity to Facebook newsfeeds, and only likes - not ratings - can be published.”

Inside Facebook suggests even with these guidelines and requirements, transparency should be the order of the day .

“Developers should make it clear when users’ activity within apps will be posted to Facebook and only publish ‘Like’ stories when users take an explicit action to Like something.”

TechCrunch agrees — developers will be able to pick and choose what app users can share. They can build in some insurance against privacy fiascos .

“The Like Action means apps that want growth don’t have to tack auto-sharing onto some action… That will give developers the flexibility to add deliberate sharing to more sensitive types of content that could have caused auto-sharing disasters.”

In the meantime, liking might not look exactly like liking . Developers aren’t locked into using Facebook’s ubiquitous thumb. VentureBeat explains.

“Instead, the ‘like’ activity can be connected to their own buttons — the heart in Foursquare’s app, for instance — for a disguised app-to-Facebook liking experience that maintains their own branding.”

Facebook has told developers — like it or not, all applications that integrate liking will move to this model within the next 90 days.