Should you be able to “abhor” Facebook posts? Threadsy says yes

Kim-Mai Cutler |

Oh, “I bought new socks” status update. How I hate thee….

And now you literally can hate them.

Threadsy, which puts e-mail and social network updates together in one stream, is experimenting with an “abhor” button to flag lame Facebook posts.

Facebook, which adopted a “like” feature in January to let people voice approval for posts, has never offered any negative reinforcement to prevent boring updates. (However, Facebook lets you “hide” updates from users you don’t want to see without offending them.)

So San Francisco-based Threadsy’s barging in with its own more pointed feature. If a post has been abhorred, it will have a link that lands at a Threadsy page reading, “This Facebook status has been abhorred. Someone must’ve thought it was particularly lame.”

Scott Kendall, who leads product at Threadsy, said the “abhor” button probably won’t be anonymous to prevent blatant spamming.

“There’d be no accountability and no impact on your reputation — same as what you see happen with anonymous blog comments,” he wrote in an e-mail. “The way I envision it, abhors should be used sparingly, jokingly, and perhaps only with your closest friends.”

Plus anonymous “abhorring” would require a special “abhor” app for Facebook. Threadsy, which is backed by August Capital, is in private beta but you can get a special invite here.

So readers, do you “like” it or “abhor” it?