Monday, March 07, 2011

Facebook Comments: First Impressions

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...Image via CrunchBaseI got excited about Facebook Comments right away, long before it got rolled out. I am very much for using real names with comments. When you leave a comment at my blog, I want the option to be able to click over to your Facebook profile if I want to. I want you to stand by what you have to say. I want to meet real people. To me that's the whole point behind the internet, that geography is irrelevant. The blogosphere's appeal is that it allows for a meeting of minds. Facebook Comments takes that to a whole new level. It is more than meeting of minds, it is also meeting real people.

Not everyone blogs, but everyone might want to leave comments at blogs once in a while. And if those comments end up on your Facebook wall, people who know you might actually read them. Otherwise when you are out and about in the blogosphere, often times you wonder if anyone ever reads your comments. It can feel like spitting into the ether.
Image representing DISQUS as depicted in Crunc...Image via CrunchBase
If you write great blog posts, this should boost your traffic. More people will comment on your blog posts, and take your blog posts to their Facebook walls to share with their friends. Who needs Search Engine Optimization? Social Media Optimization for blogs is finally here.

Facebook Comments To Go: Facebook Nailed It
Facebook Going Into Blog Comments Is Huge
What Disqus Can Learn From Boxee
Facebook Going After Disqus Now?
Finally TechCrunch "Gets" Disqus

Steve Cheney: How Facebook is Killing Your Authenticity
Facebook is really a huge broadcast platform. Everything that happens between its walls is one degree away from being public, one massive auditorium filled with everyone you’ve ever met, most of whom you haven’t seen or spoken to in years. ....... Facebook commenting. The integration of the formatting and fonts is so strong that when you're reading comments you actually feel like you are on Facebook ..... This latest push by Facebook to tie people to one identity across the interwebs is very troublesome. ...... humans are born with an instinctual desire to understand the broader context of their surroundings and build rapport, a social awareness often called emotional intelligence. ...... a uniform identity defies us. ...... authenticity goes way down when people know their 700 friends, grandma, and 5 ex-girlfriends are tuning in each time they post something on the web. ...... one social network will not rule the web... People are simply way too social to allow that.

Robert Scoble: The Real “Authenticity Killer” (and an aside about how bad the Yahoo brand has gotten)
your 700 friends are on Google. Your grandma is on google. Your five ex-girlfriends are on Google. My ex-wife is on Google. ...... the real authenticity killer is: cowardice. ..... Why does a comment with a real name have so much more value? And why are systems like 
Photo de Robert ScobleImage via WikipediaYobongo, Quora, and Facebook forcing users to use their real names? ...... I’m cheering on Techcrunch’s experiment. ..... the food fight is gone. .... the flow is down. ..... the trickle of comments that are there now are 1000x more useful and are easier to find ..... It’s really hard to astroturf when you have to use your real Facebook identity and social graph to back up what you’re posting

MG Siegler: Facebook Comments Have Silenced The Trolls — But Is It Too Quiet?
the overall number of comments have fallen dramatically. This is completely expected and definitely not a bad thing ...... Previously, many of our posts would get hundreds of comments (and sometimes more), but at least half of those would be of a quality best described as weak to poor. And of those, about half would be pure trollish nonsense. ..... when we switched to Disqus, and InstenseDebate before that. ..... whereas trollish garbage used to infest the comment section, now we’re seeing almost the opposite. Many people are now leaving comments that gush about the subject of the article in an overly sycophantic way. ...... It was difficult to look at something like Quora, where people leave comments that are engaging and thoughtful, and then switch over to our site where it was a cesspool of bullshit about many of the same topics....... We have readers of the highest caliber with a deep interest in the tech space from around the world — there’s no reason why our comment section shouldn’t reflect that. Instead, a handful of trolls were ruining things for everyone. Yes, it was often humorous, but completely worthless. And it’s amazing how quickly the trolls vanished when real identity started to be enforced. ..... We’ve already had some trolls armed with fake Facebook accounts pop back in. But they sure are easy to ban now.
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1 comment:

Web Design Perth said...

Facebook commenting is far from perfect. Robert X cringely points out correctly, that user who sign up for Facebook Comments risk posting all their comments to their own Facebook wall, and could display their friend’s pictures on other sites without realizing it. But this is largely beside the point, and it's hardly, as Cringely suggests, the "Death of Online Anonymity."