Now let’s take a look at what makes this interesting. First, you’ll notice that if you’re already logged into Facebook, you won’t have to click though any authentication options. More important, you’ll notice that any comments you write are being left under your real name, which spells bad news for you trolls and spammers. And then there are the viral Facebook-centric features that other comment engines simply can’t compete with.
Whenever you leave a comment on a site that’s using Facebook comments, you’ll see a checkbox asking if you’d like to also post that comment to Facebook. Leave it checked (it is by default), and your comment will be posted on your Facebook Wall and in your friends’ News Feeds. That’s nice, but plenty of other sites let you syndicate content to your Facebook profile. But Facebook is also giving its own comments engine a feature that nobody else can reproduce: comments can be syndicated the other way.
Let’s say I leave a comment on TechCrunch and opt to have that comment shared to Facebook, too. Then, if one of my Facebook friends comes along and leaves a comment on Facebook about my comment, their comment will be posted back to TechCrunch. In other words, any discussion that my comment sparks between my Facebook friends will be seen on TechCrunch as well. That’s very powerful, and it’s something that nobody else can do.
This is HUGE. TC is already running comments off it and you’ll see blogs, forums, all sorts of sites moving to integrate too.
The advantages are wide – in theory people will spam less with their real name attached to something (it’s harder to fake a facebook page). In reality it will make more sharing, more posts to the wall, more creation around discussions.
Big opportunity for sites that get it. No registration but all the perks of having one!
Why would a professional not want to comment as themselves? If their profile photo is that far off, chances are they are not particularly professional, but of course you can always provide an anonymous alternative.
Hai,
its very limiting because a user might not want to log in to their personal Facebook account if they commenting as a professional.
I agree, not so much about professionals or not but this basically like Quora needing you to log in via twitter or facebook… so that application can learn all about you. Unfortunately, banks are stupid and use non-secret, public information (like where you were born or where you went to school) as “security questions”. Tying everything into Facebook (and giving more and more 3rd-party applications access to your information on Facebook) just means less work for those looking for that information. Especially spammers, marketers, identity thieves etc.
Why would a professional not want to comment as themselves?
Because you’re a doctor? A lawyer? A developer for a large company? And you believe your professional life must be kept separate from your private life, where you are a fan of WWF, chocolate sundays and shih szus?? That who you consider personal friends are of no business to those who are reading your comments as a person practicing whatever or as a person working for whomever?
Are we commenting as someone who has had personal experience surviving cancer? Are we commenting as someone who works for a large bank? Are we commenting on someone whose grandmother (who is a friend on Facebook) knits scarves with swastikas or something on them?? Are we commenting as someone in a country that’s currently in political turmoil?
I don’t comment anonymously so much to hide who I am as to keep types of personal information separated and dealt out to specific areas of the web (and no, I don’t put anything I need to be absolutely private online or on Facebook).
For those who DO want their comments elsewhere to be tied together in one place, this is probably a fun app. However I’m seeing more and more places deciding to switch to Facebook-only comments. I’d rather not make any comment at all than have to go log into Facebook first. Since it’s fairly easy to see if a visitor is logged into Facebook at the time the visitor loads a web page, I don’t surf while logged into FB, because I don’t see that as anyone’s business but mine. Facebook is for me to keep track of far-flung friends. A personal thing.
This, I think is a direct hit to Disqus and “Troll” Land.
Read here peHUB » Disqus to Facebook: “We Aren’t Shaking In Our Boots”:
Disqus said: “we offer better services, read: value for you $$$”
the Trolls said: "we know the value of anonymity.’
To that, i’m imagining Facebook, saying: hey, whatever, here’s a FREE one-liner code. Add us (and let the commenting—under your true name and through our giant website, begin)!
But then again, free isn’t always as good as premium. Or is it? Anyone who’s planning on having (-- or already has) this new FB system on their site, should start a thread here and tell us about it before we all get on the band wagon.
I know as I am already there on fb but I didn’t like this as it just made the page heavy with flash so it takes more time to update the page. this is drawback so it must be removed.
I’m not completely on board with this. I think I understand why people are tipping their hats to it, but in all reality, this is not revolutionizing anything; it’s just helping Facebook monopolize more areas of the internet. That’s all.
Through time, Facebook is going to become more and more present in every damn website and while some of you might think nothing of this, I, for one, have had my share of Facebook and I wouldn’t mind seeing it go away for awhile…
I agree with Stomme and cranial-bore. I keep my Facebook G-rated and have very little personal information on there, but I won’t be using that account to post on random sites either.
It certainly has merit as a marketing tool. But besides the login and privacy issues there are two more very important things to consider that I didn’t see mentioned:
It doesn’t work with JS off
You don’t own the comments! You basically hand all that user generated content over to Facebook, and get to display it on your site only for as long as they allow you to
So even if the percentage of people using your site with JS turned off is low and you don’t care about search engines, giving away a big part of your website’s content to someone for a possible marketing benefit is something to consider very carefully.
Most commenting systems don’t work with JS off. These kinds of blogs really don’t give a rat’s about people like us.
Yeah even though it should be nothing more complicated than requests to the server and pages with the new content sent back to the client, that’s just too simple and easy for today’s developers. Today, leet AJAX is absolutely necessary— also usually just to even have the privilege of reading the comments as well.
I frequently hit enter to start a new line and now I can’t do that.
That sucks balls, people are used to typing in textareas, which once they have the focus, do not accept “enter” as form submission.
I also hit Tab>Enter to submit the comment.
In fact, forms should have been doing this all along. But some browsers submit forms whenever the user hits enter (except if they are focussed within a textarea) which I consider bad behaviour (I believe older IE insisted on tabbing to Submit first, and remember people complaining about it as a “bug”). Tabbing to the submit before hitting enter is a better thing anyway.
Since these things (comment systems) are almost entirely built out of Javascript anyway, there’s no excuse for bad usability like that. They could have Javascripted to “correct” form behaviour.
Since I don’t use the First-log-into-social-bs-site type comment sites, I haven’t noticed this problem. But it sounds like it’s breaking usability norms. Ryan’s method is not uncommon and should work.
Yes I know I can do that but I shouldn’t have to! And I HIGHLY doubt many people know how to do that on a computer. Especially people not versed in computer stuff.