If you can 'like' everything, do you value anything?

A new history of the 'like' button raises questions about what it means to interact effortlessly with others.

- Justin Fox

In the early 2000s, software developers at several internet start-ups more or less independently came up with ways for users to express approval (and in some cases disapproval) with minimal effort—a big deal in those days of slow internet connections—without having to reload the page.

At news aggregator Digg.com, every "digg" or "bury" helped determine which articles would be featured and which would not. Online community Everything2.com similarly used upvotes and downvotes, as well as a "cool" button labelled "C!"

Blog platform Xanga had an "eProps" button that allowed readers who didn't want to leave a comment to at least acknowledge that they appreciated a post.

Review site Yelp aimed to reward users for reviewing restaurants and other businesses by having readers label the reviews "useful," "funny," or "cool."

Video purveyor Vimeo set out to emulate Digg, but as a company executive later told Fortune, "we didn't want to call it 'Diggs,' so we came up with 'Likes.'"

The Vimeo "Like" button was introduced in November 2005.

Facebook, after a year and a half of pushback from chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, debuted its thumbs-up "like" symbol in February 2009, catapulting the concept from social media experiment to mainstream ubiquity.

Since then, according to estimates from the BCG Henderson Institute, Boston Consulting Group's in-house think-tank, people worldwide have clicked or pressed "like" in some form more than 300 trillion times.

The figure and the story told above are borrowed from