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Like it or not, it served as a creative catalyst, a dopamine delivery system and an emotional battering ram. It also became an international tourist attraction after Facebook plastered the symbol on a giant sign that stood outside its Silicon Valley headquarters until the company rebranded itself as Meta Platforms in 2021.

A new book, "Like: The Button That Changed The World," delves into the convoluted story behind the symbol.

In the early 21st century, technology trailblazers such as Yelp co-founder Russ Simmons, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, YouTube co-founder Steve Chen and Gmail inventor Paul Buchheit experimented with different ways of using the currency of recognition to prod people to post compelling content online for free.

Such content would help make these sites even more popular without forcing the companies to spend a lot of money. That effort required a feedback loop that wouldn't require a lot of hoops to navigate.

As part of that noodling, a Yelp employee named Bob Goodson sat down May 18, 2005, and drew a crude sketch of thumbs-up and thumbs-down gestures as a way for people to express their opinions about restaurant reviews posted on the site.

Yelp instead adopted the "useful," "funny" and "cool" buttons conceived by Simmons, but the discovery of that old sketch inspired Goodson to team up with Martin Reeves to explore how the Like button came to be in their new book.

"It's something simple and also elegant because the Like button says, 'I like you, I like your content. And I am like you. I like you because I am like you, I am part of your tribe,'" Reeves said during an interview with The Associated Press. "But it's very hard to answer the simple question, 'Well, who invented the Like button?'"

Social wellspring

Though Facebook is the main reason the Like button became so ubiquitous, the company didn't invent it and it wasn't the brainchild of a single person.聽The concept percolated for more than a decade in Silicon Valley before Facebook finally embraced it.

By 2007, Facebook engineers were tinkering with a Like button, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg opposed it because he feared the social network was getting too cluttered and, Reeves said, "he didn't actually want to do something that would be seen as trivial, that would cheapen the service."

It took Facebook nearly two years to overcome Zuckerberg's staunch resistance, finally introducing the symbol on its service on February 9, 2009 鈥� five years after the social network's creation in a Harvard University dorm room.

"Innovation is often social and Silicon Valley was the right place for all this to happen because it has a culture of meetups, although it's less so now," Reeves said. "Everyone was getting together to talk about what they were working on at that time and it turned out a lot of them were working on the same stuff."

Hollywood's role

When Goodson was noodling around with his thumbs-up and thumbs-down gesture, it didn't come out of a vacuum. Those techniques of signaling approval and disapproval were ushered into the 21st century zeitgeist by the Academy Award-winning movie, "Gladiator," where Emperor Commodus 鈥� portrayed by actor Joaquin Phoenix 鈥� used the gestures to either spare or slay combatants in the arena.

The positive feelings conjured by a thumbs-up date further back in popular culture, thanks to the 1950s-era character Fonzie played by Henry Winkler in the top-rated 1970s TV series "Happy Days."

The gesture later became a way of expressing delight with a program via a remote control button for the digital video recorders made by TiVO during the early 2000s. About the same time, Hot or Not 鈥� a site that solicited feedback on the looks of people who shared photos of themselves 鈥� began playing around with ideas that helped inspire the Like button, based on the book's research.

Others that contributed to the pool of helpful ideas included the pioneering news service Digg, the blogging platform Xanga, YouTube and another early video site, Vimeo.

Big breakthrough

Facebook unquestionably turned the Like button into a universally understood symbol, while profiting the most from its entrance into the mainstream.

FriendFeed, a rival social network created by Buchheit and now OpenAI Chairman Bret Taylor, unveiled its own Like button in October 2007. It wasn't successful enough to keep the lights on at FriendFeed, and the service was acquired by Facebook. By the time that deal was completed, Facebook already introduced its Like button 鈥� only after Zuckerberg rebuffed the original idea of calling it an Awesome button "because nothing is more awesome than awesome," according to the book's research.

Once Zuckerberg relented, Facebook quickly saw that the Like button not only helped keep its audience engaged on its social network but also made it easier to divine people's individual interests and gather the insights required to sell the targeted advertising that accounted for most of Meta Platform's $165 billion in revenue last year.

The button's success encouraged Facebook to take things even further by allowing other digital services to ingrain it into their feedback loops and, in 2016, it added six more types of emotions: "love," "care," "haha," "wow," "sad," and "angry."

Facebook hasn't publicly disclosed how many responses it accumulated from the Like button and its other related options, but Levchin told the book's authors that he believes the company probably logged trillions of them. "What content is liked by humans 鈥� is probably one of the singularly most valuable things on the internet," Levchin said in the book.

The Like button also created emotional problems, especially among adolescents, who feel forlorn if their posts are ignored, and narcissists, whose egos feast on the positive feedback. Reeves views those issues as part of the unintentional consequences that inevitably happen because "if you can't even predict the beneficial effects of a technological innovation how could you possibly forecast the side effects and the interventions?"

Even so, Reeves believes the Like button and the forces that coalesced to create it tapped into something uniquely human.

鈥淲e thought serendipity of the innovation was part of the point,鈥� he said. 鈥淎nd I don鈥檛 think we can get bored with liking or having our capacity to compliment taken away so easily because it鈥檚 the product of 100,000 years of evolution.鈥�