In what seems like a natural progression of feature roll outs, we saw Facebook recently refresh and reboot some of its features. Last week, it introduced the Community Pages, retconned its Become a Fan button into the Like functionality and unveiled the Open Graph protocol with its accompanying API. These new features aimed to make user experience a lot more immersive and even more social while slowly making Facebook the nexus that binds the entire Internet together.

Seeing these as a beneficial marketing bump boat to carry their brands and deliver valuable information, many companies and blogs have since jumped onboard. Not surprisingly though, they came by the thousands (50,000 was the last official count actually) and they continue to grow; boosting the social networking site’s user base while expanding their reach further.

Employing Open Graph’s Like social plugin, LikeButton.me aggregates the news, links and other items “Liked” by other people across participating sites. Designed by California-based Zach Allia, it offers a clean dashboard-like user interface which is far more user-friendly and easy on the eyes compared to having to constantly watch your Facebook Activity Feed to know what your friends are into.

Feeds are neatly set in boxes for each Web site, which, at the onset, include 35 popular ones like YouTube, CNN, CNET, MTV and Rotten Tomatoes. You can also view them by 14 predefined categories including Video, News, Tech, Entertainment, Games and Sports among others. Each feed comes with the avatar of your Facebook friend who Liked it along with the number of Likes it has garnered so far. At the bottom of each box, you can search for all the mentions of the source Web site and all the Likes within each site.

LikeButton.me aggregates the items your Facebook friends have “Liked”

You can also add any site to the list by specifying its URL on the custom text field at the bottom as long as that site has, of course, integrated Facebook’s social plugin. At the top of the page, meanwhile, you’d find a singular pane that displays the most Liked items from each category which is updated every minute. There’s also the Trends tab that displays the top 10 trending topics on Facebook posts updated every 15 minutes.

One little drawback though is that you won’t be able to organize these boxes in your desired order (to prioritize the sites you visit most, for instance). However, since LikeButton.me was only coded and announced last week (mere days after its developer attended Facebook’s F8 developer conference), bugs or missing functionalities should be expected. But as it stands, it already does a fine job as a Facebook news aggregator and by allowing it to mature a little with a few tweaks and capabilities added here and there it can be a great social media tool.

Tags: Facebook, Like, LikeButton.me, News Aggregator, Open Graph, social networks, Tool Time, Zach Allia