Blogs are about community and comments. Comments add value to a post and the dialogue that occurs within the comments really helps shape and define the culture of your blog, too.
So, anything that makes it a little easier for visitors to leave a comment, the better!
That’s exactly what WordPress.com has done.
Whenever I’ve found myself wanting to leave a comment on a Blogger hosted blog, it’s always a pain. Sometimes during the credential process, I’ll just give-up. WordPress.com was a pain, too, until I finally grabbed a username, etc … But, only because my wife was hosted on WordPress.com for a time.
Now, you can leave comments on WordPress.com hosted blogs by using your Facebook or Twitter account!
Saving these few extra sign-in steps, not only makes it easier for users to leave comments (which is a blog – WIN!), but commenter’s can control which identity they want to use.
As an important touch, we let you stay logged in to multiple services. This means you can stay logged in to Facebook for convenience, but still leave a comment through Twitter or your WordPress.com account. Just click whichever identity you’d like to use, and the selected one will be associated with your comment when it is published. You’re in control of your identity, as you should be.
Everybody wins.
If that wasn’t cool enough, WordPress.com hosted blogs can change the text above the comment box to whatever you want! Just go to your Dashboard > Settings > Discussion.
WordPress.com is even teasing us a little bit, saying:
Stay tuned for better Twitter and Facebook integration features, coming soon.
Really?
Sounds awesome.
I wonder if we’ll see some of this come to WordPress 3.2?
Now, go write a blog post and get yourself some shiny new comments!
[via WordPress.com Blog]
(As a side note, take a look at the WordPress.com Blog URL slug. They’re missing “k” from “facebook.” It’s good to know that everyone makes these kinds of mistakes ;-))
Mark says
So I’m wondering: – Will it autopost to facebook? You know when u usually have that lil tickbox saying “share the comment on FB…
I’m using FB comments on my blog at the moment and I’m liking it except that the plugin wont pull the comments in to the database as a backup.
This will surely replace that if it works how it suggests.
Eric Dye says
I don’t believe it auto-posts, it simply uses the set avatar, bio and link to how you’re signed in.
Justin Dela Cruz says
so how do you get this same comment functionality on a wordpress.org self hosted blog?
Eric Dye says
Good question. If there isn’t a plugin out there for it, or you don’t have the chops to code it yourself, I’m wondering if we might see this on future releases, or at least a plugin by Automattic/WordPress – like what they did with JetPack.