San Francisco — World’s most popular social networking giant Facebook, which quietly unfurled its real-time commenting for all users in late January, allowing users to see new comments by others appear in-line without having to refresh the page. Real-time commenting across the site has been live for about two weeks now, but Facebook has only confirmed the new feature Monday.
Facebook’s new real-time commenting system, which the company said does more than just bring an IM-like conversation to the comments that appear under wall posts on Facebook pages, allowing users to see new comments by others appear in-line without having to refresh the page.
“Live commenting, which we released to all of our users a couple weeks ago, creates opportunities for spontaneous online conversations to take place in real time, leading to serendipitous connections that may not have ever happened otherwise,” writes Facebook’s Ken Deeter in a Monday blog post.
The upgrade, which brings a more dynamic experience to the social network’s interface, may also encourage users to spend more time on the site-certainly good news from Facebook’s perspective. The feature, which got its start at a Facebook Hackathon, was no small undertaking. Every minute, Facebook users post 100 million pieces of content to the site that could possibly receive comments, and in that same minute, users submit 650,000 comments that need to be routed to the right Facebook user.
Mobilizing live commenting was not easy, however. Facebook engineers had to devise a new “push-based design” to get the feature to work on such a massive scale. “To make this feature work, we needed to invent new systems to handle load patterns that we had never dealt with before,” Deeter wrote.
The system unburdens the load on Facebook’s servers by utilizing a “write locally, read globally” approach to managing the traffic of people who are just reading content vs. traffic from those who are posting comments to that content.
“Because humans are so sensitive to response time in real-time communications, creating a truly serendipitous commenting experience requires comments to arrive as quickly as humanly and electronically possible,” Deeter wrote.
Though it seems nothing but natural for Facebook to abandon asynchronous conversations in favor of more fluid, spontaneous discussions. However, now it is possible that only the most devoted members will take advantage of the feature, while more casual users-those who visit the site occasionally a few times a day (or less)–would not find it very compelling.
Real-time commenting promotes engaging, rapid-fire conversation and prevents mishaps like one user asking a question that another has already answered. So the next time you see a new comment magically appears on a post while you are either thrashing out your own comment or scrolling along just catching up on your friends’ latest adventures, know that the Facebook engineers literally flipped the entire process on its head to make it better.