Facebook Adds "Send" Button

Clicking the Send button brings up dialogue to share with an individual, or group, of friends. Recipients then get the message without it showing up on the sender's wall.

The button is currently on 50 early sites, but will likely spread across the Internet, such as the Like button. The Like button is now installed on over 10,000 sites a week and celebrated its first birthday last week.

As user's lists of "friends" have grown into the hundreds, including old school acquaintances, people met at parties, work colleagues, family, and people actually considered "friends," broadcasting universal "likes" has become trickier. The Send button addresses this problem.

It also makes it less likely that users will resort to e-mail for sending such material, further locking them into Facebook. Already, many people using Facebook's messaging instead of e-mail. Also, the recently introduced messaging feature that allows responses to Facebook messages directly from e-mail ensures that as much communication as possible flows through the social network.

Though it remains the champion of U.S. social networking, Facebook could face increasing pressure from Google, which recently unveiled its "+1" button, a sort of Like button for search results, and has tied all employee bonuses to the performance of the company's social networking initiatives this year.

Facebook is currently the second-most visited site in the U.S. according to web metrics provider Alexa, though it has displaced Google for the top spot before.