The social networking powerhouse is making it even easier for bloggers and publishers to incorporate comments on their sites from Facebook members, with the brand new Comment Box social widget for Facebook Connect. The widget lets publishers enable comments from Facebook users on their blog with simple cut and paste code, and in turn, have those Facebook users publish the comments back to their Facebook profiles.
According to Facebook's Developer blog, "With the Comments Box, Facebook users on your site can comment on your content, post those comments to their profiles, and share them with their friends on Facebook. The Comments Box allows non-Facebook users to make comments on your site as well. And via our APIs, you can access related comments made on Facebook as well to bring the conversation together."
Publishers can even completely customize the look and feel of the comment box by specifying background colors or using their own CSS. And with 175 million users, bloggers and publishers alike should salivate over the commenting news, since it essentially creates an opportunity for their content to get much more exposure from commenters' Facebook circle of friends.
When Facebook recently released their, "I like this," feature they were already starting to infringe on FriendFeed territory, but now that Facebook users can easily add their comments from across the blogosphere, Facebook activity feeds will start to look even more like FriendFeed streams.
Plus, today's move appears to strike up competition with popular commenting platform Disqus. We get the feeling that the comment box is the just first release in a lineup of social widgets for Facebook Connect, and we have to wonder what other startups they'll put under fire.
To add a comment box to your site, just head over to the blog post and follow the instructions provided, or check out the video below for a brief tutorial.