I’m going to begin pissing everyone off by becoming a Facebook Connect Evangelist. If you work with me on a project, ask my advice or mention starting a site that relies on user interaction, I’m going to recommend you use Facebook Connect and I’ll even set it up myself. The Internet is growing exponentially and there are still new users joining every day. Millions of people launch a web browser for the first time every week and a new person discovers YouTube, RSS or Blogging every minute. It doesn’t take very long until that person is sharing their ideas with others via comment boxes. The ability to comment on someone’s work is fantastic and interaction with any kind of media wasn’t possible in such an easy to use way until the web. You could write letters to the editor or maybe call into to some question & answer show on the radio or TV but most times the volume was so high that all you would get was a busy signal.
I love commenting on blogs and I also love creating my own content. When people reply or comment on my content, it’s a great feeling because I’m able to see their opinion and collaborate on ideas. As many of you know, I’ve lately had an issue with anonymous commenters. As The Internet grows larger, you’ll notice that more people comment anonymously and thus they feel that there is no need to offer responsible and insightful feedback. Anonymity reduces our midset below that of children and to that of wild animals and this is 2009 and the excuse of anonymity cannot be tolerated anymore.
There was an excuse from one person that made sense. A commenter on TechCrunch stated that she works for a company that is in PR and commenting on articles could get her in trouble. My response? Don’t fucking comment! What’s so hard about that? Do you have a disease where you have to comment on posts?
From this point forward, everything I work on will have Facebook Connect integration. I spent 4 hours setting it up on this blog and I’m very happy with the results. I’m not a developer and it took a lot of reading but it works beautifully.
You can comment using Facebook Connect and you can even share these posts with friends via Facebook Messages or a Share on your profile’s wall without leaving the site. There’s also a box that shows recent visitors and you can see their limited profiles and some comments they made on this site using our Facebook App Combined with Disqus comment engine.
This is just the first step to reducing anonymity on the web. Facebook’s platform is excellent and if you’re not able to share your identity with everyone when commenting then I don’t want your comment. Feel free to call me out with anything you want. You can even tell me “you suck” and that’s your entire comment but I will know that you’re John Smith the Realtor from Ohio with three kids and a dog named Willie. That’s how it should be. I’m going to expose my life in this blog and I’m going to be completely honest then you should be as well.
Adam, I think that this is absolutely fabulous. I think that I would love to integrate this on my blog. Great post! P.S. I'm happy to see you opened the comments back up because despite how strong your feelings were about it at the time, turning comments off is like a totally disconnect with your readers. To be more honest, I felt put off by it. I like your posts and it was a bit disappointing.
Moving on however, it's all good now. :)
I've been going less and less anonymously for the last year in an effort to get my name out a bit more and help build my reputation. Your new thinking might not just get rid of the anonymous cowards but also might encourage them, as well as others who just haven't been interacting out of shyness, to civily express their opinions by exposing the to a medium that they are already somewhat familiar with (which would be Facebook).
Do you think there's a way to integrate FBC with Blogger? I'm going to look through the documentation later. I've been pondering using this system for a while, and it just makes too much sense not to.