Friday, March 4, 2011

Facebook Friday: Social Commentary

Despite all of the iPad 2 buzz dominating the news headlines, Facebook has still had a pretty good week. Not only are the latest rumors claiming that the social networking giant is valued at $65 billion dollars, but Facebook also released a massive third-party applicable commenting plugin earlier this week as well.

The commenting plugin closely resembles what you would see on a user's wall, with threaded comments that can be liked and voted on. The comments can also be synced to the user's Facebook page, leading to two primary advantages:
  1. If you're already signed in on Facebook you don't need to re-sign in to access the commenting feature, making it easier for people to comment on articles.
  2. The use of people's real names should theoretically cut down on the trolling that usually plagues the blogosphere.
The system is far from perfect however, with a few major issues still in need of tweaking.
  1. Because the system requires a Facebook login, anyone who works somewhere that blocks Facebook will have to wait until they're out of the office.
  2. Another downside of profile syncing is that if people reply to a comment in the Facebook News Feed it could end up on other sites. This could lead to a lot of non-sensical inside jokes in commenting streams.
The other question still looming is what this move means for Disqus, the commenting plugin startup that has been very popular the last couple of years. My guess is that it will be very similar to what happened to Foursquare after the launch of Facebook Places. In that scenario, many flocked to Facebook Places because of its huge built-in user base. 

However, in the end both services have managed to coexist, and I think we'll see the same thing with Facebook Comments and Disqus within a month or two.