Facebook and Tuenti faced the same Like button dilemma

Update 2025-10-27: Adjusted the sentence about the reasons why Tuenti pivoted back to Like, based on feedback (thanks, Luis!).

Facebook's Like Button

I recently listened to a podcast episode about the story of Facebook/Meta. When the episode reaches the year 2008 and the like button launch, they mentioned something that caught my attention: Before launching it as the "Like button", it almost became the "Awesome" button. Apart from being curious, what's special, you might say? Well, let's first briefly mention some key points related to it, and then I'll explain why.

• There was an earlier internal prototype, with the "Awesome" label.
• There was also a proposal (or prototype) about calling it "Cool".
• It was proposed to use instead "Like", but it felt less good, and initially rejected.
• Before the public launch, top management took a decision to go with the "more bland" option. Reportedly Zuckerberg himself made the call, but probably not alone.
• The rollout finished in 2009, and one of the reasons "Like" won was that it was the "industry standard".

History Repeats Itself: The Tuenti Like Button

Tuenti was a Spanish social network that operated from 2006 to early 2016, with its peak between 2008 and 2012. I had the pleasure of working there from 2009 to 2013 (to this day, probably still the best and most fun gig), in the whole explosive growth phase [1]. Facebook was present in Spain, but it was yet quite niche, mostly "for adults", while we had the majority of youngsters.

We sometimes innovated, other times mimicked what other social networks built: Facebook, Friendfeed, Orkut, and we saw the rise (and fall) of Google+. So, of course, at one point we had to add some sort of "like button". But to make things different, and factoring in the fact that we had almost the full young demographic group, we initially went with "Mola" (Spanish translation of "Cool"). But when it publicly launched in 2011, it was "Like" so what happened? Well, it happened almost the same as in the case of Facebook!

• The initial idea was to differentiate from the competition, and call it "Mola".
• As an internal joke, my colleagues called the interface IMolable, to "mark" the entities you could like (feed posts, photos, comments, and such).
• Internally, we loved the name: It was different, fresh, funny, and we thought that it aligned well with our main user base. In Spanish, "Like" is "Me gusta". "Me mola" ("it's cool") was catchy and common slang.
• The English translation was "Cool", which was also different from other social networks' like buttons, but still translation-friendly.
• We had it running in production with "mola", but internally, only for employees.
• We ran internal and external polls, user surveys, and "Mola" was always the preferred choice.
• A few weeks (maybe days?) before the launch, upper management reversed course and decided to rename it "Like". It was mostly driven due to fear of looking less serious, less "industry standard".

Reflections

While we did not know at the time about Facebook's "awesome button", we repeated quite the same events. The pattern isn't accidental; "like" is safe, as it avoids slang, emotion, and sounds more formal.

As a way of soft but harmlessly protesting about the decision, a colleague (and very good friend) and I built a meme/parody around it. All names in the parody are real [2], and includes a few internal jokes 😉.

Big disclaimer: While it uses footage from the Downfall movie, since around 2010, that meme became the standard way to parody frustration online. We also only added subtitles to the original German audio track, so if you know German, you might want to mute it to not get distracted.

This is the parody/meme (link version):

References

I did some research to confirm that the "Awesome button" was not a myth, and the two most relevant sources that I found were this TechCrunch article and this Quora thread.

Luis Peralta, who was Tuenti Like button's tech lead at the time, wrote some related fun facts at LinkedIn, be sure to check them out!

Notes

[1] IIRC, when I joined it had slightly above 1 million registered users, and we peaked around 15 million in 2012. We were probably one of the top 3 Spanish sites regarding traffic.

[2] To recognize names and topics is part of the fun if you worked at Tuenti at that time. We played it at a "town hall" and everybody took it with humour.