The FaceBook and llama buttons are only available to Charter Members who pay an extra fee.
The buttons allow you to enter the name of a Straight Dope Member.
The FaceBook button then links their FaceBook account with the SDMB. Every post they make is automatically entered onto their Facebook Wall.
The llama button then changes their FaceBook picture to a random picture of a llama of the appropriate gender.
Dude. If you want us to accept that, you need to stop saying things like this:
This analogy has nothing whatsoever to do with a Facebook share button. At all. In any conceivable way. If you want to make some small business analogy, putting a share button on this site is like standing on the sidewalk in front of your local bait & tackle shop, looking down the street, and being able to see a Macy’s. They don’t give a shit about either at all, they’re not competitors, the bait & tackle will not start selling suits, and you will never have to get a Macy’s credit card to by fishing line. The **only **connection, besides both existing (in the same town/on the internet) is that a few people sometimes go to both.
Also, the only business argument to be made in this situation is that the Chicago Reader decided to make their message board property easier for their users, with absolutely no conceivable downside whatsoever to anyone, yet people are whining about it.
I’m sorry if this comes off as patronizing, but nothing you’ve said in this thread indicates that you actually understand what a share button is or does, and I don’t really know how to make it any clearer.
I guess you don’t understand it then, if you think that someone posting a link on Facebook to a thread on this board means that Facebook is going to “gather data about you.”
How in the world do you think that Facebook, or anyone reading it, would even know who you are?
So **Troy **posts a link to a thread here on his Facebook page. A friend of his clicks on it and reads the thread and somehow you think someone on your Facebook page would see the link, read it and figure out who you are?
If you are that paranoid about people finding out information about you, don’t post information about yourself online.
I guess *you *don’t understand that the thing about Tesco’s was about homogenisation, with a semi-relevant side note of everything being linked up as well as being the same. Anyway, I don’t care enough to carry on with this since all you can say is that I don’t understand. I do. I don’t like it. I’m not paranoid or scared, and I’ve said that I know me not liking it doesn’t make any difference. But oh look, patronising me didn’t convince me. I still don’t like it. End.
But placing a 15x15 link button here does not homogenize the SDMB. If you were to say that adding Facebook Connect here as an option, you’d have a point.
And that’s the entire idea behind the internet.
To be clear, linking everything together is the idea behind the internet. Turning everything the same is not the idea behind the internet, nor behind adding a bit of HTML to a message board.
And if you don’t want anyone to know this stuff about you, then don’t put it out on the internet in the first place.
New blood is good: I support this decision. I’m puzzled why there’s no Facebook button, given that Facebook is larger than google-bookmarks and the other 3 buttons put together. Cite. Twitter might also make sense.
FD: I am not yet on either Facebook or Twitter.
I usually post with no clothes on. I guess I’ll have to be more careful now. 
Simply install AddThis to Firefox and then you can share any page on the Internet on FB. Right click brings a drop-down menu that includes Add-this for any social site you want.
My not-so-rational opinion (objection) to linking to Facebook stems from Doper’s comments. IME, most threads that mention Facebook complain about the vast sea of stupid that’s out there, particularly in status updates and comments. My not-so-rational fear is that links to SD columns will be used as retorts to the stupidity, drawing the stupid here.
This does sound like it’s very much in the fighting ignorance vein, but most of the complaints aren’t quite about general ignorance but about deliberate ignorance and childish antics.
That has nothing to do with Facebook. That has everything to do with some SDMB members apparently having stupid friends.
I don’t believe you! Because connecting to Facebook sends all of your information to everyone that has ever used Facebook! EVER!
Go ahead and laugh, but a friend of mine finally gave in and signed up for Facebook a few months ago. And now they’re dead. Coincidence?
Well, on a positive note, at least now it doesn’t matter that Facebook has all his information!
It will when Mark Zuckerberg reanimates his corpse and then sends him targeted ads. But he’s good until then.
Well, the dumb buttons here on the boards did serve to get me to renew my membership quickly enough! I panicked, remembered that it was May, and OMG I’m seeing advertisements!
Sweet zombie Jesus! That’s awesome! Now I’m going to go log in to Facebook, and do some linking to threads. Where is the Zombie option on the control panel, I want that.
Can someone explain how Facebook is going to get your information. Either they already have it because you signed up and you have an account or if you don’t have an account, there is no information that could possible be obtained.
For the users who are worried about the unwashed masses flooding in, the time to object was a few years ago when Google indexed the boards.
I have no strong opinion on this, but I am one of the people who was (and remains) strong opposed to avatars, and some folks seem opposed to these ‘Sharing’ buttons for similar reasons to my opposition to avatars, and some of the arguments against them are very similar as well, so I’m going to post a few thoughts anyway. So there.
One, there may or may not be some confusion about ‘how the internet works’ from both camps. It’s worthwhile to fight ignorance where you see it, but if you address the low-hanging fruit and ignore real objections, you make a weak argument. The anti-sharers seem to be consistently worried about SDMB’s discoverability: specifically, they do not want to increase it. We have a good community: most of you all (though not me, sadly) are smart and articulate, and if you’ve ever read the comments on YouTube, you’ll know that’s not true for the larger internet. I can’t prove correlation, much less causation here, but it certainly seems to be the case that once Google started indexing SDMB, a lot more posters who .. let’s just say don’t fit those criteria .. started showing up here. Google indexing is helpful, sure, but I’m not sure it was without a price. I am sympathetic to efforts to impose some separation between SDMB and the wider internet.
In anticipation of responses to that last sentence, I’ll come to my second point. The pro-sharing, pro-avatar crowd seems to make frequent use of the Strawman logical fallacy. MsWhatsit, I like you, I really do, but I’m going to pick on you here, since you posted a handy example:
This is what I mean. No one is freaking out that SDMB is linked to on the Internet. Everyone knows it is. You know everyone knows it is. Everyone knows that you know that everyone knows it is. This type of comment only has two effects, both negative. One, the antis spend a lot of time explaining what they actually think over and over and having to assert they actually understand fundamental ideas of the internet. And two, they get defensive, feel put upon and talked down to, and leave the thread. Neither of these is conducive to a productive conversation.
Also, for the record, I still think SDMB is a special snowflake. I’m not sure why this idea is worthy of mockery.
The thing is, the kind of people who click any of the Share Links buttons are the same kind of people who would post the URL to sites already. The only thing that changes is the easier more direct method. I don’t think it would effectively change anything at all.
Plus the threads aren’t really the kind of thing that would be worth posting anywhere anyway. It’s not like blog posts where it’s an interesting article. We just talk about any old crap and argue over it or make jokes about it. Who’d want to share that?
A few notable examples are things like the “If LOTR Was Written By Other Authors” thread which was our biggest online hit, despite a lack of share buttons, and which nobody complained about its sudden popularity and influx of new members that came with that; in fact they were proud of it, and it brought a lot of the kind of folk that fit in here very comfortably.