Facebook’s “Like” button has been very popular in recent years; and is one of the features which helps Facebook standout from its rival social networks in a semi-innovative way. Facebook has now come up with a new idea — a “Want” button.

Facebook has, till now, enabled users to “Like” pages, websites, or products that they find all over the Internet. Now, one of the officially undisclosed plans of Facebook is to introduce a “Want” button. It isn’t exactly clear what this “Want” button will be used for but surely Facebook will think of something creative. For example, users might be able to “Want” certain products or services, thus paving way for a wide range of methods in which the data can be used to alert companies to the desires of their consumers.

Developer Tom Waddington of Cut Out + Keep, a site allowing users to make and share craft tutorials, revealed on his personal blog earlier this week that he came across a “Want” button in the social networks’ Javascript SDK. The button is not currently listed on Facebook’s list of available site plugins, seeming to indicate that the company didn’t want the news to slip just yet.

The data collected using this new “Want” button by Facebook can be used by advertisers to provide better targeted advertisements for their products and services. This will further increase the successful ad click-throughs, and thus result in more money for advertisers and Facebook. Facebook could even use the data to build a list of items that a user ‘wants’ (or, would like) to have and share that data with the friends of the user, giving people a chance to gift others with what (s)he wanted to have.

Facebook might have been planning to release the news on the “Want” button probably in a grand fashion; but it has now slipped out rather loosely and the “Want” has already started getting “Likes”. ;)

[via CNET]