Facebook’s engineers had a Like button ready to launch by November 12, 2007. Mark Zuckerberg would not let it ship. A rival, FriendFeed, launched its own version first. Facebook did not switch its own version on until February 9, 2009, five years after Zuckerberg started the company in a Harvard dorm room.
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Who clicked first
A Yelp employee named Bob Goodson sketched thumbs up and thumbs down icons for restaurant reviews on May 18, 2005. Yelp passed on his idea and went with “useful,” “funny” and “cool” buttons instead. Around the same time, other Silicon Valley founders were chasing the same idea from different directions: Twitter’s Biz Stone, PayPal’s Max Levchin, YouTube’s Steve Chen and the Gmail engineer Paul Buchheit were each testing low-effort ways to reward people for posting content free.
Buchheit’s own social network, FriendFeed, got there first. It launched a one-click Like button on October 30, 2007, while Facebook’s version was still in development. FriendFeed’s button was not enough to keep the company running on its own, and it was later acquired.
The gesture itself is older than any website. Emperor Commodus, played by Joaquin Phoenix, decided a combatant’s fate with a thumbs up or down in the film “Gladiator,” and audiences had already read a raised thumb as approval from Henry Winkler’s Fonzie on “Happy Days” in the 1970s. TiVo put the same gesture on a remote control button in the early 2000s. Around the same time, Hot or Not, Digg and Xanga all contributed ideas, according to the book’s research.
Why Zuckerberg said no, twice
Facebook’s engineers argued over what to call the feature in 2007. They tried a star and a plus-and-minus sign before proposing “Like” internally on August 22, 2007, to a response the company’s own engineer Andrew Bosworth later called less than enthusiastic. The team stayed loyal to their first idea, engineer Tom Whitnah later said, insisting “no word could be more awesome than ‘Awesome.’” Zuckerberg was the one who ruled it out.
He ruled out the whole feature too, for a while. When the button reached him for a final review on November 12, 2007, it failed. The concerns were whether the click was public or private, whether it would cannibalise the site’s share feature, and whether it clashed with a project called Beacon. “Feature development as originally envisioned basically stops,” Bosworth wrote afterwards. The idea needed another two years to reach Facebook’s own users. The symbol raised its own question: a thumbs-up reads as approval in most cultures, and something far coarser in a few others.
What the click set off
The effect was immediate once the button finally went live. A single click was the easiest way for a user to respond, far less effort than typing out a comment, and Leah Pearlman, the Facebook developer whose team had built it, remembers the jump it produced: “Fifty comments became 150 likes, almost immediately.” People started posting more status updates, she said.
Every one of those clicks was also a data point. At Cambridge University, the psychometrics researcher Michal Kosinski worked with David Stillwell, who had written a Facebook quiz testing the “big five” personality traits. Taking it gave the researchers access to a user’s profile and everything they had liked, along with their friends’ public data. The quiz went viral, and the dataset grew to millions of people. Kosinski noticed that a slightly higher share of gay men than straight men had liked the cosmetics brand MAC, one data point among thousands that let him guess at things nobody had stated outright. Seventy likes, he said, told him more about someone than their friends knew. Three hundred told him more than their partner knew. Facebook has since restricted how much of that data reaches outside developers, though it still mines likes itself, to shape news feeds and to target adverts the way a small-town shop once picked one trade paper over a national one.
How the button kept changing shape
Facebook expanded the button to outside websites in April 2010, turning it into a plug-in any site could carry, then extended Like to comments that June, giving a reply the same one-click nod as a post. The idea did not stay Facebook’s alone. Liking a post became just as ordinary on YouTube and on Twitter.
A long-running request afterwards was a Dislike button. Asked about it in a public Q&A in December 2014, Zuckerberg said Facebook had “no plans” for one, wary that a blunt negative could become “a force for bad” rather than good. What shipped instead, on February 24, 2016, was Reactions: a long press on the Like button opening five more responses, Love, Haha, Wow, Sad and Angry. Facebook added a Pride-flag reaction in June 2017 and redesigned the icons again in April 2019.
An idea nobody can quite claim
Facebook did not invent the Like button, and its own engineers spent two years unable to convince their boss it was worth shipping, yet the company profited most from what it became. The symbol eventually grew large enough to stand as a physical sign outside Facebook’s Silicon Valley headquarters, a spot tourists visited for photographs until the company renamed itself Meta Platforms in 2021.
Martin Reeves, co-author of a book on the button’s history, put the puzzle plainly. Anyone can say what the Like button does. Naming who did it is another matter: even now, he said, it is hard to answer “who invented the Like button.”
