stanlemon

Dealing with comments on blogs has always been a nuisance to me. If you don't layer in security you wind up overwhelmed with spam, but if you do layer in security you find that no one posts comments. There are also issues of maintaining conversations, you need to provide some way of notifying users when followups occur. It's a real conundrum and even the best attempts from great blogging platforms like WordPress leave something to be desired. In my experience the best way to leverage comments on content is to use validated accounts, but who really wants to do that? You have to maintain the account system, provide lost password functionality and the whole thing hinges on validating e-mail addresses. It's a pain.

Today I added support to my site for Facebook comments. I really believe this is the best option for user feedback on websites. The bottom line is that with over 500 million users you can count on the majority of your web traffic having a Facebook account. Facebook has done a fairly decent job preventing spam and so with their comment integration you prevent having to maintain a larger user account system while also providing a level of security while not complicating the process. It's really a great idea. Even better is the fact that comments integrated into Facebook provide multiple ways to keep people updated in the conversation and allow for conversations to continue to build.

Adding support is a piece of cake too. You head over to the Facebook Developers page, sign up and the code is pretty much a drop-in and go. With the comments widget you also get the "like" widget, which is a great way to get a nod from visitors without requiring them to think of something to actually say.

Additionally I added Twitter's tweet widget to provide some integration on that front. Admittedly, this does not really help the comment dilemma, but it's cool nonetheless. Expect these things to pop up over on HT soon too.