for consumers Facebook applications out there, that I’ve seen at least,” he says.
The Like button itself, although very minor-looking as a single feature, is generating enormous amounts of data. Since it was introduced last year, use of the Like button has grown so fast that Facebook advertising chief Carolyn Everson recently said that there are now 50 million “likes” each day for Facebook pages.
For its part, Likester doesn’t even cull all Like data that it could—the only things in the database now, representing more than 15 million items, are likes for Facebook pages or outside websites. There’s the whole universe of more personal signals, such as liking comments, photos, and status updates that the startup isn’t even touching right now, for fears that users will balk at the extra approvals as being too invasive.
“It’s very much a tradeoff,” McCarthy says. “We already ask for five or six things, and as you start adding more and more requests on there, your conversion percentage declines proportionally.”
So how does this all lead to shopping? Right now, Facebook isn’t a major commerce platform. But as Facebook’s Everson also mentioned, personal recommendations are the “holy grail for branding.” And Facebook does allow product codes like UPCs to be embedded in merchants sites when they tie into the Facebook social graph. Not much is being done with that data right now, but McCarthy says it clearly points to the possibility of a socially connected, high-quality recommendation engine for products and services.
“We haven’t quite solved this all the way out, but where I think this is going is that Facebook will be kind of a clearinghouse for both e-commerce information—that is, who has what at what price—and what I call affinity … That is, people who like this, also like this,” McCarthy says.
That should sound pretty terrifying for online shopping sites, maybe even up to the scope of a behemoth like Amazon.com, which uses a much less humanized technology to recommend products on its site. But, provided Facebook allows developers to build around that part of its ecosystem, the idea sounds tantalizing to entrepreneurs like McCarthy.
“Say that in a year or two years, all the merchants are wired up in this fashion, and we’ve got all these consumers and their friends using our service. That positions us very well to be at the forefront of social affinity. I won’t say today that I know what that means,” McCarthy says with a laugh.
Fascinating as that all sounds, Likester’s bootstrapped nature means it has to first focus on the nitty-gritty of growing its user base, holding on to the people it has, and improving the service at hand. “I can write some checks for a while, not forever,” McCarthy says.
To that end, look for Likester to start popping up more on your radar screen as the 2012 election cycle heats up—yes, it’s already well underway. Likester is already capitalizing on the interest by dedicating a special tab on its page to the Republican nomination contest. And if I know my brethren in the media correctly, the combination of a blockbuster campaign and a household name like Facebook will definitely lead to some free publicity for Likester.
“It is scary to be building on top of any platform,” McCarthy says. “It’s more than hitching your sail to someone else’s boat. It’s like borrowing their cabin.”
