Two important changes coming to Facebook Comments

Facebook launched Comments earlier this year, allowing third-party sites to use a plugin that enabled users to comment on a site via their Facebook profile. Many sites saw the advantage in this, as it took away the need to require people to register a profile such as through Disqus, but it also brought an additional social benefit to commenting.

Now, when someone comments through Facebook Comments, it feeds a story back to their newsfeed, alerting friends to the site. While this can be seen as slightly spammy – after all how many of your Facebook friends really want to know where you’ve been commenting – the ‘viral’ effect of this was clear. Now Facebook have introduced a change to Facebook comments that is designed to lead to more interaction on the Facebook Platform.

Subscribe to Comments

To mirror the ‘subscribe’ feature now added to Facebook profiles, you are now able to subscribe to Facebook Comments on third party sites. The feature has just been launched by Facebook and is visible on sites using the comment plugin :

You can subscribe to comments without leaving an update yourself and you are then subscribed to that particular commenter. When you navigate to their profile on Facebook, you are now subscribed to them in the same way you would be for other profiles. For people that spend a lot of time commenting on other sites to grow their community, this presents a particularly good opportunity to grow your subscribers on Facebook, leading to a more 360 experience.

Google now indexing comments

This is not something that Facebook have actively introduced, but rather is a change brought about by Google and the way in which they index comments. Now when you comment both within Facebook and on a third party site, that comment is now crawlable by Google, leading to it being indexed on the search engine.

From Google’s point of view, it’s easy to see why this change has been implemented. It allows them to get one step closer both to Facebook content and Facebook users. The implications for those actively seeking promotion are positive – there is now an increased chance of getting found via search. But if you are commenting privately, the privacy implications here are questionable. It means that even more of the content you’re producing is easily discoverable by others. And while many will be aware of the implications of this, news that Google is now indexing Facebook Comments is unlikely to reach the mainstream.

Let’s wait and see whether Facebook does anything to block this, as it’s unlikely they’ll allow Google this access for too long.