At yesterday’s F8 conference, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg proclaimed there would be “one billion Like buttons on the web within 24 hours after launch.” True to his word, we’re seeing an impressive numbers of “Like’s” popping up across the social network and connected sites. But what does all this likey-likey talk mean for us?

Consumers
Get ready for some serious online social shopping and plenty of word-of-mouth recommendations on products from your network. By pressing the Like button on a site you are making a recommendation to your friends and their friends. They can see what you like and you can see what they like. You can leave a comment and look at other comments, turning online shopping into a much more social activity. And this can apply to any product or service found on a website.

Retailers
All of this Liking and re-Liking can have some serious positive effects for your site traffic numbers. When a consumer likes something on your site it will be projected through the Facebook universe, allowing anyone who sees the recommendation to follow it back to a retailer’s site. Of course, all this interaction is visible on the retailer’s site. This doesn’t mean, though, that it’s as easy as turning on auto-pilot. Be conscious about how you do it. Bad buzz is just as likely to circulate as good.

Advertisers
This is where things get interesting. All of this activity is going to be recorded and archived into Facebook’s “semantic metadata” set called Open Graph. Information about people interests, who their friends are, their favorite restaurants, etc., will eventually be available for browsing. After some use, this could all be used as a massive “interest” search engine, as the search gurus at Search Engine Land remark, which could potentially rethink the way we search for information on the web. Advertisers will be able to get a good picture of potential customers, who they hang out with, and what other things they are into.

However, there is one big feature that’s conspicuously absent in all this discussion of connecting us and our network through our personal tastes. Where’s the  geo-tagging? Privacy advocates may be relieved it’s not yet in the cards, but it’s only a matter of time before Facebook makes this introduction as well.