FYI, there will never be a standard facebook button on PerlMonks so long as I have any say. Corion appears to agree with me on that. The standard "usual suspects buttons", especially for facebook, are designed to funnel lots of usage information to the owners (of facebook, etc.) because they figure they'll find ways to sell that information or otherwise monetize it.

Yes, if you want to make sure that facebook knows about every page you visit at PerlMonks, feel free to add their standard iframe to your Free Nodelet. That is your choice.

However, it is possible (I assume) to make non-standard usual suspect buttons that don't feed information about every single page visit off to third parties tracking every perlmonks page you visit because you still have a facebook (etc.) cookie.

But then, I've never looked at what tricks facebook might use to try to force people to make use of their iframes and javascript. I would expect them to try to make it at least inconvenient to create a "like" button that doesn't funnel usage information to them. Certainly, we have a perlmonks page on facebook so we could make a facebook logoish that links to that so people could "like" the site in general that way.

If we were having some critical shortage of visitors to PerlMonks or googling just about anything Perl related didn't usually link to PerlMonks in the first page of results, then some of these things might even be good ideas. We've certainly had more serious problems (rarely) on the other side, that is, when some node on PerlMonks goes viral and the whole site suffers from the teeming throngs gawking for our "15 minutes" of their attention span.

But I'm not dead set against having non-standard usual suspect buttons. I'd probably start with twitter just because they make me feel the least creeped out or worried when I consider stamping their logo all over the site.

I can empathize with a desire to increase Perl's mindshare. Not that I think the problem is that not enough people have heard of Perl. Most every technical person I've met knows of Perl. It is just way too common for them to think a lot of bad things about Perl (most of which I quite disagree with). So more attention to Perl may not actually improve Perl's rep. I don't know. One would hope that more attention to PerlMonks threads would help more than hurt Perl's rep, though.

The more technical community "like" buttons (reddit, digg) worry me because they seem most likely to lead to "slashdotting" (as well as to bringing a rude throng down upon the site). Facebook creeps me out because its owners have repeatedly shown a great desire to do really creepy things with private information. Google+ is too new for me to be comfortable shoveling too much information toward them yet.

Twitter doesn't creep me out. I can even see uses for it, though the site manages to thwart most of my attempts to actually use it (like how getting useful information out of the thing is usually ruined by rampant promotion of verbatim "retweets"). But, no, I'm not drawn to batch-mode IRC with random bozos throughout the world -- each time I read a batch of tweets (other than sh*tmydadsays) I am reassured that there is nothing about tweeting that I am missing out on that would suit my personality.

Making it easy for people to tweet about a specific thread (or node) at PerlMonks would at least be an interesting experiment to try.

Linkedin I actually use (a little). I don't trust them to not abuse information about every page visit, of course. But, a while ago, while I was between jobs, I even did some work trying to make an official PerlMonks "group" on linkedin. I made some logos and came up with a scheme for automatically allowing people to prove their membership. But that scheme was thwarted by not being able to get e-mail to perlmonks.org to work well and then trying to set up an alternate e-mail address for the scheme got shoved aside because I was extremely busy moving and starting a new job.

And I think there might even be more benefit to Perl by increasing PerlMonks' mindshare on Linkedin than increasing tweets about Perl. I don't know that Linkedin groups support it, but I think it would be cool if we made it possible to put a badge on your Linkedin profile that "proves" not only that you actually registered at PerlMonks, but that you reached "Level $N"... an interesting twist to the XP game.