14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook seems determined to make its new website comment platform a success and is constantly tweaking it. Now it's rolling out second set of updates, a little over a month after it launched the revamped comments system.
Developers now have a chance to customize what shows up in the News Feed when someone comments on their sites. You can also link directly to specific comments.
If you don't want the Comments Box sticking out too much, if you have a darker website, you can now change the color scheme. You can only choose between the light and dark color schemes, but it's a start.
"Since the updated Comments Box plugin launched last month, more than 50,000 websites have added it to their site. Today we’re launching new features to help increase traffic, engagement, and the quality of comments on your sites," Facebook's Jerry Cain writes.
Whenever someone makes a comment using the Facebook tool, that comment also shows up on their news feed. Until now, this meant the actual comment text and a link back to the article and that was that.
Now, webmasters can add thumbnails, article titles, the site's name and other details to make the status update more interesting for readers and maybe get them to read the article themselves.
Another small update but an important one is the possibility to link directly to a comment. Clicking on the time stamp, as is the norm with many websites, will provide you with a link to the actual comment rather than the top of the page.
Facebook Comments are great if you need a social platform which also provides identity for your website, but, as with most Facebook plugins, it does stand out, in a bad way, on most sites. Facebook is easing the pain somewhat, by introducing a dark color scheme that integrates better with some websites.
Another addition is support for Hotmail as an identity provider. Users can already log in with their AOL or Yahoo accounts to comment using the Facebook Comment Box and now they can do it with Microsoft accounts as well. Google and Twitter, which have been rumored to be supported even before the revamped comments platform launched are still nowhere to be seen.