Facebook's Like button started as a 2007 hackathon project called the "awesome button" and sat rejected for two years. The team worried it would kill conversation, but likes actually sparked more comments. The speaker claims credit for the design, with their name in the commit history.
So you invented the like button? It was developed as a hackathon project in the summer of 2007. Like, it got bounced by Mark Zuckerberg. Internally, it was called the awesome button. It lived in product purgatory internally for about 2 years. And we were worried that we were going to cannibalize conversation with, like, like buttons. If we stop having people talk to each other and just, like, clicking buttons at each other. And it turned out all of our product intuitions from years of working on Facebook were dead wrong. That people were more likely to comment and talk to their friends if there were preceding likes on a given post. A lot of people claim credit to designing it, but I know my name's around the commits.
