A World Wide Web of Facebook Comments

Ars Technica posts a note: Continuing its march to Google's beat, Facebook has taken another major step towards dominating both the social Web and your blog with its first social widget, called the Comment Box. Built on Facebook Connect, this easily embeddable box turns Facebook into a hosted comment system, and it brings some interesting conversational features to the mix.

Detailed on the Facebook Developers blog and wiki, the company's new Comment Box allows any website or blog owner to use Facebook for their comment system. A snippet of code can be added to static pages, or CMSes like Movable Type and WordPress via plug-ins, to embed the Comment Box. Whether visitors have a Facebook account or not, the box allows them to comment, and admin controls are provided to weed out the inevitable spam.

If website visitors are Facebook users, though, the typical Facebook Connect advantages come into play: leaving a comment creates a news post on one's Facebook profile. This means that a website owner's content gets syndicated across Facebook and friends get to check out and partake in the conversations that you have elsewhere on the Web—plus, there is one more unique advantage to the Comment Box.

When friends reply to your comments on Facebook, their replies will appear in-line on the original website or blog post. This is a big step towards aggregating "the conversation" that occurs around content, as the good ol' days when people just left comments on blogs are long over.

Now people link and talk about content on Twitter, FriendFeed, their own blogs, Facebook, and who knows where else. A number of solutions are trying to wrangle this conversation, ranging from FriendFeed comment plug-ins for WordPress, conversation trackers like uberVU, and conversation search engines like BackType. Facebook's approach is, naturally, focused only on its own ecosystem, but it still looks like a good solution for this conversation challenge. It is also a bonus for content owners since it will help to keep people chatting about their stuff both on and off Facebook.

In terms of hosted comment systems, though, Facebook is certainly not alone, as these systems often provide comments for services that have none (such as Tumblr), or more feature-full replacements for Movable Type and WordPress. Intense Debate, which WordPress' parent company Automattic acquired last year, has been in the game for a while. Disqus, a competitor, quickly integrated Facebook Connect support, allowing website and blog visitors to log in with their Facebook credentials. Then there is, of course, Google Friend Connect, which came out of beta on the same day as Facebook Connect to provide a hodgepodge of commenting and social widget features for third-party websites.

In addition to taking over the conversation across the Web, Facebook's new Comment Box also continues the company's recent push to open up. It recently introduced new Facebook Platform APIs that allow third-party developers to post status updates, notes, links, and videos from their applications. Facebook will also soon support OpenID, though questions remain as to how far that support will actually go.