Palo Alto, California — Just last month, Facebook unveiled its new and improved comments plugin for content sites. On Tuesday, the social media powerhouse Facebook released several updates to the newest version of its Comments Box social plugin for third party, has now been installed on over 50,000 websites, and to mark the milestone the site is releasing a number of new features with the addition of Hotmail integration that allows users to log in via their Hotmail account.
It unleashed features like the use of social signals to order comments based on quality, improved moderation tools, which will increase the referral traffic it drives, and give sites API control so they can export, analyze, and re-order comments. The plugin can now publish a full news feed story with an image when users post comments, and users can log in using their Hotmail account.
Most significantly, the integration of Hotmail account is a much-needed add-on as many users who were using Facebook commenting had to use their “real-world” identity when leaving comments that used the platform. Now, with outside services such as Hotmail being bundled into the mix, it should allow Facebook to grow the platform in a much more efficient (and effective) manner. Apparently a lot of sites have been using it.
Larger News Feed Stories: One of the most noteworthy upgrades is an increased size for comments in the news feed. The result is that those publications which implement the new comment service are likely to have an increased conversion from news feed exposure. These distribution, flexibility, and access updates significantly increase the plugin’s appeal, and should lead to more installs on top of the 50,000 websites that have already integrated it. Similar to the Facebook’s like button, comments will soon become a significant source of referral traffic from within the site.
Comments API: While the social media giant has featured a comments application programming interface for sometime now, the new commenting system now officially consists its own API as well, documented on the site’s official developer blog. These include a permalink to specific stories, an API to pull comments, Bigger News Feed stories, a new color scheme option aimed at dark-colored sites, and the addition of Hotmail as a login option.
With the API, developers and site owners can “highlight the most captivating comments, perform analysis on the comment stream, reward top commenters, search through existing comments, and use comments to improve SEO on their site,” Facebook says.
“News Feed stories produced by Comments activity can now have greater social context, which can increase the click-through-rate (CTR) back to the original site and motivate people on social media Facebook to contribute to the discussion,” the company adds.
Moreover, with Hotmail as a new login option, simply indicates that Facebook is open to adding more options, the plugin may be more attractive to more users, which will open up commenting through the plugin to more of those without a Facebook account. Publishers want to give readers as many options as possible.
Interestingly, with a new dark color scheme that makes the plugin harmonizes better aesthetically with darker sites. Permalinks, accessed through a comment’s timestamp, will let users share their comments through email or other social media sites like Twitter, and also make moderation simpler.
Facebook said it will automatically upgrade all sites to the new version of the comments plugin on April 29th. Those wanting to upgrade now, however, can do so today by adding the ‘migrated=1′ parameter to your existing <fb:comments> tag.
As Facebook continues to embellish their commenting platform and has a number of benefits, it has not been immune to growing pains. Besides the lack of anonymity that using a personal Facebook profile undermines, other concerns have been brought to the forefront.
For instance, moderators can not edit user comments, which can be useful for when someone writes a good point but that is sprinkled with objectionable language. However, the ability to edit someone’s comments, which are sync’d to their profile, could raise security and authenticity issues.