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Facebook is gearing up for f8, their annual developers conference, on Thursday, and everyone is dying to know what they'll announce. The word on the blogs Monday morning hinted at something big: a media platform, probably be music-centric for now. TechCrunch buoyed that idea with a late-in-the-day scoop from an unnamed source: more buttons. Leena Rao reports:
We've heard from a source that Facebook will introduce new buttons on the wall that will begin introducing some granularity to the "Like" concept. We're told these new buttons are "Read," "Listened," "Watched." The network will also soon launch new social commerce buttons like "Want" following the introductions of the aforementioned buttons.
More buttons! Rao made it clear that the button rumor comes "from a source (and not from Facebook)" but Liz Gannes at AllThingsD corroborated the details. "Sources said 'Read' partners include big online publishers such as Yahoo," Gannes reports. "While 'Watch' will be a range of Web video sites and 'Listen' will be music services."
But wait a second. More buttons? The genius of the Like button, announced at the f8 conference in 2010, was simplicity--one button everywhere to express all of your ambiguous Internet emotions. At first, the Read, Watched and Listened layer seems like it complicates things, unnecessarily. Do Facebook users really want more things to click?