SMS and IM Deserve More Attention
I realized recently that if I did work, I would not use email. I talk to my friends via SMS, IM, and Facebook, in order of frequency.
“Don’t make a better x, make a better user of x”
I realized recently that if I did work, I would not use email. I talk to my friends via SMS, IM, and Facebook, in order of frequency.
The Comments Box is a great way for any website, blog or photo gallery to add social comments to their page in just a minute with a few lines of code.
A few friends have sent me links to this article asking my reaction and thoughts re: Disqus vs Facebook Comment Box. I haven’t played with the Comment Box too much yet, but my initial thoughts are:
As a reader of comments, Comment Box will improve my experience by attaching real names and faces to blog comments. I hope that decreased anonymity will increase responsibility and make the social cost of being a deuchey commenter higher and lead to more thoughtful and less sophomoric conversation. In this regard, seems pretty similar to Disqus and massively superior to builtin commenting tools bundled with blogging software.
As a commenter, if I have to authenticate separately to every site I want to comment on, this will be a bit more annoying than Disqus but tolerable. Facebook Connect authentication is pretty fast. My bigger concern here is how Comment Box will index on Google. Right now, Disqus comments I leave on my own blog index better than my blog itself, because I use Tumblr and the SEO is poor. I have a friend who actually puts half of his post in Tumblr post body, and the other half in a Disqus comment on the same post, just so his stuff will actually index. I also get a lot of traffic from my Disqus comments on other blogs, when people click on linkbacks in my Disqus profile after reading comments I’ve authored elsewhere. I doubt Facebook Comment Box will be open to search crawling, so from this POV I prefer Disqus.
As a blog publisher using Disqus comments on my blog, part of my motivation is making things easier for commenters and comment readers in ways I’ve described above. The other reason I love Disqus as a publisher is kickass email integration. Instead of visiting a post (on my blog or someone elses) to take part in a conversation, I can just respond via email to comments. The result is so smooth that I respond to threads probably 200% more than I would otherwise.
Summary: as usual, from a product point of view, Facebook seems to have done well with Comment Box, and the real concern is the privacy/openness one. I think blog comments should be a bit more open by default than the general privacy settings I think of as being right for Facebook. Plus, the Disqus product is still a bit superior. I’m not switching anytime soon.
