Remember Facebook’s Send button? It was the company’s follow up to their widely successful Like button. They launched it almost two years ago this week and pretty much nobody has used it since.
It was designed to let you share a page directly with specific Friends using Facebook’s proto (or should that be pseudo) email service, Facebook Messages. Even though it wasn’t used that much by the public, Facebook seems to have a fondness for it.
Back at the time Facebook described the Send button as the next step for the Like button, “A year ago,” they said, “we launched the Like button, which gives you a quick way to share the things you find on the web with all your friends. But there are times when you find something that you only want to share with a few specific people.”
It appears that in all the recent redesigns that Palo Alto has been pushing through they’ve resurrected the Send button in a limited format.
Facebook image send
With the new Facebook Timeline design users can now send photographs that they or others have shared directly to friends’ Facebook Messages inboxes. But, why the change and why only on images?
The reason for adding the Send button to users’ images, and not to any other posts is simple. We interact with photographs and images more on Facebook than we do with plain text posts. We’re more likely to comment, share, like, and (Facebook is hoping) to send.
Facebook is trying hard to encourage us to actually use Facebook’s complete Messaging service. It was launched back in November 2011 as a “modern messaging system,” which ( with usual hyperbole) the company described as “the way that the future should work.”
And since then no one has really bothered with it. Even after changing users’ default email addresses to Facebook ones, still no one used it. The question is, will people start using it now?
