Moving forward, people who have already included the Comments Box to their website will find that it is now automatically honed-up for mobile. One of the cool things about the comments box plugin itself is that it threads the conversation through your blog as well as the user’s Facebook wall.
The plugin identifies when a user is on a mobile device and disregards the width parameter so that comments are displayed at 100 percent. Developers can turn this behavior off by setting the mobile parameter to false and control the width manually. Documentation details are available from Facebook’s developer site.
Previously, websites that associate Facebook Comments had to resize the box for mobile browsers, but there was not a dedicated mobile version of the plugin. This makes execution easier for developers, and for users the feature seems to load more quickly.
The social media network is strongly touting its comments plugin as a way for media sites and blogs to improve the quality of online conversations and increase user engagement, and as a method of driving traffic to sites and reduce spam. We use Facebook Comments on InsideFacebook.com and have written about how the feature can sort comments by relevance and affect a site’s Google search rankings.
Facebook’s mobile Comments Box. (Credit: Facebook)
“The Comments Box for mobile is the latest update to the plugin to make commenting more social and authentic, improve the quality of conversations online, and drive traffic and engagement to media sites,” Facebook said in a blog post. “For instance, in December we added a Subscribe link in the plugin next to the names of people who have turned on Subscribe to help them grow their Subscriber base. You can learn more about adding the Comments Box to your site, and best practices for implementation here.”
“We are continuing to see media sites of all sizes add the Comments Box, including the York Daily Record (York, PA), The USA Today Science Fair blog, and Gannett sites such as The Statesman Journal (Salem, OR), Burlington Free Press (Burlington, VT), and Detroit Free Press,” the company said.
“By holding commenters answerable for their actions through Facebook, the hope is that this will help keep the conversation interesting and stimulating for the rest of us,” Gannet executive Paul C. Grzella told the social network.
Furthermore, they are making things absolutely effortless for those publications looking to execute it on their mobile sites. If you use the plugin on the desktop version of your site, it will automatically appear on the mobile version of your site as well. It does not get much simpler than that.