Don’t Give Away Your Conversations: Why I Don’t Recommend Facebook Comments
by Aaron Hockley on March 9, 2011
Facebook recently launched a service that allows websites and web developers to implement comment systems using Facebook. How does this matter to photographers? We have blogs, right? And blogging without comments is only half-blogging. Instead of using the comment system built into your blog software or using a third-party comment system such as Disqus, the Facebook comments would replace your site’s comment features with a Facebook-powered comment system. Users would need to authenticate via Facebook and their real identity would be shown.
The upside is that identities are more likely to be “real” and it’s easy to connect conversations across platforms. On the other hand, it eliminates anonymity which is important to some folks.
In my mind there’s a bigger issue: once you outsource your comments, you lose ownership/control of your conversations. If Facebook goes down, accidentally loses some data, or decides you’ve done something inappropriate, your comments can disappear in a second. I use the Disqus service for convenience but unlike Facebook comments, the Disqus comments are stored in and synchronized with my WordPress database. I control the comments and could export or move them away.
It’s cute (and scary) how Facebook wants to become the internet, but I’m not willing to let Zuckerberg & Co. control the content created by my readers and me.
Tagged as:
blogging,
comments,
disqus,
facebook,
facebook comments,
wordpress
Don’t Give Away Your Conversations: Why I Don’t Recommend Facebook Comments
by Aaron Hockley on March 9, 2011
Facebook recently launched a service that allows websites and web developers to implement comment systems using Facebook. How does this matter to photographers? We have blogs, right? And blogging without comments is only half-blogging. Instead of using the comment system built into your blog software or using a third-party comment system such as Disqus, the Facebook comments would replace your site’s comment features with a Facebook-powered comment system. Users would need to authenticate via Facebook and their real identity would be shown.
The upside is that identities are more likely to be “real” and it’s easy to connect conversations across platforms. On the other hand, it eliminates anonymity which is important to some folks.
In my mind there’s a bigger issue: once you outsource your comments, you lose ownership/control of your conversations. If Facebook goes down, accidentally loses some data, or decides you’ve done something inappropriate, your comments can disappear in a second. I use the Disqus service for convenience but unlike Facebook comments, the Disqus comments are stored in and synchronized with my WordPress database. I control the comments and could export or move them away.
It’s cute (and scary) how Facebook wants to become the internet, but I’m not willing to let Zuckerberg & Co. control the content created by my readers and me.
Tagged as: blogging, comments, disqus, facebook, facebook comments, wordpress