Every Web Action Will Be a "Like" Soon

First came the advent of “I READ THIS” on Facebook: “Joe Schmo and 4 other friends recently read articles.” Oh did you? That’s neat. Sure: the age of automatically reported behavior began stodgily. A little sadly. And also, there was the rise of activity timelines: “Lady X commented on her own status”!

Now there’s Svbtle, a blogging… platform? Maybe? But more likely a blogging network? It is currently in invite-only form, and was built by one Dustin Curtis to function as a digital scrapbook that allows him to store ideas that, at some point, become published posts. (The rest of us just use Gmail drafts for this. Or our minds.) It’s smart: “This interface doesn’t force me into thinking about ideas as posts, like every other blogging system does. I don’t have to sit down and think about a title and content, and I’m not expected to publish immediately.” (And it already has had its own little “you ripped me off!” drama, as all good products should have.)

There was also, however, a new little invention pioneered by Svbtle… a brilliant, goofy, and evil invention.

Keeping in mind of course that the word “kudos” is disgusting, but that all other forms of “like” are pretty much taken, Curtis built a button on the sites that essentially gives a “like” to the page being viewed — on-hover. Yup, there’s a “target” and you put your “mouse” (LOL, or trackpad) over it and boom, your KUDO is registered.

This resulted in a very hilarious letter to Mr. Curtis:

As much as I would like the CSS Working Group to collapse under the weight of its own miserable failure, I sincerely hope that buttons that do not need to be pressed in order to be triggered follow the same path as idiotic animated paperclips and I very humbly request that you kindly decrement the Kudos statistic by one unit in order to compensate for the one that I definitely did not intend to send until it was forcefully withdrawn from me by a deceitful human interface.

Whoever wrote that is an Internet Hero.

Curtis responded:

I’ve received about twenty emails and many more tweets from people with the same complaint. Somehow, when that hover button is triggered, people feel like part of their soul is being sucked in through the monitor by a CSS animation. Many use the word “theft”. I think it’s kind of funny.

I hereby propose that when your (largely) unpublicized personal private beta system generates twenty emails of complaint about a feature, that means that people absolutely hate it.

Except that this is exactly what every big web company wants. It’s so close to unifying a pageview with a “like”! It’s the ultimate in the blending of the New Internet Nice with the New Internet Share Everything. All the tech needs to do now is auto-magically send that “kudo” to the viewer’s Facebook wall and the Internet will be complete. (Completely ruined, that is.) Next step: the load of a page itself becomes the giving of a little digital heart.