ReadWriteWeb

Facebook launched its first social widget for use outside of Facebook's own site today: the Comments Box. The Comments Box is a comments widget that was built on top of Facebook Connect, and that will allow bloggers and publishers to easily implement a Facebook Connect enabled commenting system on their sites. A number of sites already used Facebook Connect to make it easier for their users to sign in to their services and leave comments, but this is the first time that Facebook itself ventures into this business.

Commenting on blogs is - by and large - broken. Designed with the hope of proffering interaction among bloggers and readers, commenting has generally devolved into a series of one-off responses with little actual conversation. Why? It's not designed to facilitate conversations. That's why you see any number of people - Intense Debate and Disqus, most notably - working to provide technology that enhances the conversational dynamic. Now, a new open source project from Jim Jeffers promises to enhance commenting in a way that is both natural and conversational. Meet Encouraged Commentary.

In a slew of press releases today, the commenting and profile company SezWho has announced partnerships with social marketing company Izea, blog widget advertising network Entrecard, and blog network Creative Weblogging. SezWho is under a lot of stress from Disqus and Intense Debate and this round of partnerships with relatively small and, in the case of Izea, dodgy companies makes this seem like a somewhat desperate move.

Recently, Facebook changed its layout involving the commenting functionality on Mini-Feed items. Before, you had to click on the plus sign ("+") to add a comment, but now the word "comment" is written out. VentureBeat is reporting on this change and notes that it's probably to make the new commenting functionality more visible to users, since it appears that few are currently using this feature. But is it possible that the lack of use isn't because Facebook users didn't notice it, but because they just don't care?

Have you ever posted a message on Twitter asking for responses to a blog post you'd written? Frustrated that you can't get those replies on your blog without doing multiple screenshots? Chirrup, a Twitter comment system, may be just what you are looking for.

At the end of April, we covered the launch of YackTrack, a new tool that helps fight the conversation fragmentation issues. The service provides a method for tracking the conversations taking place around your content. You just enter a URL and it searches sites like Digg, Disqus, FriendFeed, Mixx, StumbleUpon, Technorati, and WordPress to find who is saying what.

Our first daily Comments Competition winner is Dan from BlogMinistry, who left this comment on Josh Catone's post CNN to Launch Completely User Generated News Site. Congratulations Dan, you've won a $30 Amazon voucher, courtesy of our competition sponsors AdaptiveBlue and their SmartLink Widgets.

Here is Dan's comment, with some great advice for big media companies using web 2.0 technologies...

As many of you know, we recently underwent a re-design at ReadWriteWeb and upgraded our publishing system at the same time. Unfortunately that resulted in some frustrating technical glitches with our comments system. However, we're now pleased to report that ReadWriteWeb's comment system is back running 100% -- and it's a heck of a lot faster than it used to be. And yes, we now have OpenID! [sound of dogfood being eaten]

To celebrate our new comments system, from Monday 11 Feb (US time) we are giving away one $30 Amazon gift voucher every day for the next month for the best daily comment.