If you’ve been trying to find Facebook’s “Share Button Generator”, and have been redirected to the “Like Button Generator” instead, there’s probably a good reason behind it; it has been deprecated.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t much public notice on this issue. A few weeks ago I made a post on this blog declaring that the Facebook “Share” button was deprecated, citing a good deal of historical evidence to help shore up my suspicions: first, that around May 22nd, 2010 Facebook announced the “merging” of the “Share” and “Like” buttons; second, that around December 23rd, 2010, the “Share” functionality disappeared entirely for a day, before outrage on the internet brought it back to life; and third, that previously existing “Share” buttons were displaying curious behavior as recently as the 22nd of January, 2011.

However, an internet reader suggested that the functionality was instead moved. I looked into it, and without any other hard evidence to back up my claim, I ‘redacted’ the post. Well, I’ve got that hard evidence now. It is indeed deprecated.

Facebook recommends now that you consider using the “Like” button in lieu of the “Share” button. It has stated that it will continue to support the “Share” functionality in the future, but as with any deprecated functionality, web folk cannot depend on it forever.

If you are looking to produce similar results to the “Share” button, I suggest you look at the the Open Graph API and stream publishing: see the Feed Dialog in the Open API docs here. It gives you a little more flexibility than the old “Share” button, such as the ability to pass the-data-for-sharing in a JSON object, and you can use the functionality to style your own “Share-eque” button, a boon to anyone who is getting a little tired of incorporating Facebook’s ubiquitous dark-and-light blue theme into every design they produce.