• The New York Times et al., Monday, April 19, 2010 12:50 PM

Not content with its already dominant online presence, Facebook is branching out farther beyond its own borders with several soon-to-launch products and technologies.

Chief among them is a universal "Like" button that Web publishers will be able to put on their pages. "Similar to the Facebook 'Share' buttons that are already popular with many Web sites, the 'Like' buttons will make it easier for Web publishers to offer more social experiences, in essence allowing Facebook friends to enjoy those sites together," reports The New York Times.

"Can Facebook get any bigger," The Guardian asks on the news. "The new 'like' feature makes [sharing] much more substantial, allowing publishers to offer a wider range of social sharing tools and giving Facebook more data and what is being shared and who by," it writes. What's more, a "toolbar powered by Facebook Connect will let developers add more Facebook features at the bottom of pages, so users can log in the 'satellite' sites with their Facebook ID."

According to The Next Web, the entire rationale behind branching out is driven by Facebook's desire to improve its ad targeting ability, which requires more information. With its new features, "Users can click the Facebook button while off-Facebook, signaling the giant with new information about their preferences that will then be fed into algorithms for advanced, and dead-on, advert targeting," it writes. "More and better information will allow Facebook to boost its CPM and CPC rates significantly."

On Wednesday, when Facebook is expected to unveil its "Like" button and other features, John Battelle suggests that the network could debut a syndicated ad network on the back of Facebook -- "a la AdSense... one never knows, it just might."

Meanwhile, as GigaOm and others note, Meebo is rallying a number of platforms and publishers to allow for greater information sharing without Facebook's help. Rather than offer users myriad sharing services, a new open platform called XAuth was released on Monday -- with the support of Google, Microsoft, MySpace, Yahoo, JanRain, Disqus and Gigya -- which only displays a users' preferred sharing service.

Read the whole story at The New York Times et al. »