Facebook launches comments widget for web publishers
Facebook’s Connect service already lets users comment on news articles and other web-wide content using their Facebook identities. Now the company is taking another step, by letting web publishers install the actual Facebook comments interface within their own sites. For web publishers who just want their comments tightly integrated with Facebook, this could help drive up interaction on their sites. Connect isn’t just a distributed identity service, it shows your friends on Facebook where you’re leaving comments, potentially getting them to check an article out, too.
From VentureBeat’s perspective, we use Disqus, which comes with its own set of features, like threading comments, spam filtering — and Facebook Connect integration. So I’m not sure why we’d use this new widget.
Still, it looks pretty interesting. Here’s more on how it works, from a company blog post on the new feature:
With the Comments Box, Facebook users on your site can comment on your content, post those comments to their profiles, and share them with their friends on Facebook. The Comments Box allows non-Facebook users to make comments on your site as well. And via our APIs, you can access related comments made on Facebook as well to bring the conversation together.
I’m interested to see that last part works. While this is somewhat like what another commenting service, IntenseDebate (recently purchased by Automattic, the company behind the WordPress blogging platform) offers with FriendFeed integration, some comments on Facebook certainly aren’t intended to be made public.
In the post, the company also notes that more than 6,000 developers have used Connect, and sites with Connect integration have seen up to 50 percent increases in comments.
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About the Author, Eric Eldon
Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.
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