Over the past few weeks I have noticed the emergence new entries in my Facebook news feed, consisting of “[Person] likes [inane phrase here]” and a link to websites I had never head of. When I clicked through the link, you end up at a page with just [inane phrase here] on it, a Facebook ‘like’ button, and advertising (the last bit is a lie – most advertising is turned off in my web browser)
It appears that new type of website has emerged, that work like this:
1. Allow a user to enter a random string of text.
2. Put that piece of text into a webpage, and give it a unique URL.
3. Allow user to ‘like’ the piece of inane rambling on Facebook.
4. ???
5. Profit!
Examples of these websites include http://fblike.net/, http://www.fblike.com/, http://mylike.co.uk/superlike/, http://chelick.net.
They seem to have cropped up in the past few weeks since Facebook enabled third party websites to place “Like” buttons on their sites, a feature from April 2010. Does anyone know what this new genre websites should be called?
