A vulgar comment was made by a reader of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's website on Friday on an article about the strangest things you've ever eaten. The headline was practically asking for a juvenile response and, thanks to the anonymity of the internet, that's exactly what happened. In the comments section of the article, one user posted a single word response referring to a part of a woman's anatomy. Of course, the site's moderators quickly deleted the comment but it soon reappeared - obviously this juvenile was intent on having their say.

But this time, instead of just deleting the comment in question, the site's director of social media, Kurt Greenbaum, did a little sleuthing too. He found that the commenter's IP address was coming from a local school...and that's where this story starts to get interesting.

Greenbaum contacted the school and made them aware of the situation. In his defense, he probably thought he was simply tattle-telling on a naughty student who would learn a valuable lesson about internet anonymity and would have to sit through a week's detention or something of the like. Instead, he cost a school employee his job.

Yes, as it turns out, the commenter in question wasn't a juvenile after all, just someone with a juvenile mind. Greenbaum learned of the firing when the school phoned him back six hours later to report their findings. They had confronted the employee and he had resigned.

Crossing the Line? Or Justice Served?

The question being hotly debated now is did Greenbaum go too far? Or did the commenter get what they deserved?

Mathew Ingram, the blogger and communities editor for Toronto's The Globe and Mail, writes on his personal blog that his paper's site has seen hundreds or even thousands of comments, most of which are much worse than the one Greenbaum saw, but he would never - and has never - contacted someone's workplace about them. He calls Greenbaum's actions "over-the-top" and apparently, many commenters on STLtoday.com's website agree, calling out Greenbaum over this incident.

And yet Greenbaum seems to show no remorse, responding to one commenter who accused him of hating moderating so much that he decided to get someone fired by saying: "Yeah, you caught me! I made him log on to his computer at work, visit STLtoday.com's Talk of the Day, read the item, type a vulgarity and hit the 'submit' key."

Sixteen pages of comments now follow that initial interaction, and the majority of them seem to agree that Greenbaum crossed a line, save for the occasional concerned parent who didn't like the idea of this vulgarity-posting person hanging around their children instead of doing his job.

Lesson to Be Learned: Watch What You Say!

We can't blame Greenbaum for the sleuthing bit - any blogger will tell you they've been tempted to hunt down the identities of nasty commenters from time to time. But calling someone's work? That's just wrong.

Yet while Greenbaum may have been seriously misguided to do what he did, this should be another sobering reminder to anyone trolling the net that what you type may come back and haunt you one day. There's no such thing as true anonymity on the net these days, and thanks to new technologies like Facebook Connect, the days where you can hide behind a made-up web handle may be numbered. In fact, Facebook itself may even owe its success to how it forces users to post with their "real" name and identity notes blogger Kent Newsome. "With a name comes accountability, and there is a direct correlation between accountability and behavior," he writes.

That may be true, but the fact of the matter is that the STLtoday website allows anonymous comments. When you make that choice, then you have to expect that some of them will need moderation - it's just part of the job. Regardless of the site's policies about vulgarity, phoning the employer seems like an over-reaction to the incident. But that's just our opinion. What do you think?

But there has to be something more nuanced than just thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons. And so...

More Noise to Signal.

Bloggers have always been somewhat nervous about 'comment fragmentation' when it comes to services like Blogged, but there can be no doubt that these services also bring new readers to these blogs. The new widget that Blogged introduced today should help to alleviate some of these fears, as it will allow bloggers to showcase the discussions about their posts on Blogged back to their blogs.

After this redesign, Blogged definitely feels like a mix between Google News and the Facebook news feed, which is not a bad thing. The blog directory, which once formed the basis of Blogged, has now been relegated to the back pages of the site, though it still provides a valuable service in its own right.

Fytch claims their technology allows for more "freedom of speech" since you're now able to leave comments on any site on the web even if the site doesn't have a commenting system in place. Plus, the comments left on a site using Fytch can't be moderated or deleted by the site's owners.

The service seems most similar to Glue, a social browsing plugin which lets you identify what books, movies, and music your friends are into by tracking users' activities on the web and then sharing that along with your personal comments with your online network. However, unlike Glue, Fytch doesn't operate as a browser plugin. (Glue is limited to IE and Firefox only). Instead, all that's required to use Fytch is a browser bookmarklet. For some reason, their website identifies this as a "Safari bookmarklet" but it actually works in any web browser.

Before you can start using Fytch, you have to create a Fytch account. However, you're able to sign in using Facebook Connect, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, or OpenID, so the process is relatively painless.

Using Fytch

To leave a comment, the process is simple. You click the bookmarklet, then click a button on the toolbar which appears so that you can leave your comment. This activity takes place in a pop-up window of sorts which hovers over the web page itself as opposed to a sidebar window, as many co-browsing services have used in the past.

There's also a "Fytch Dashboard" where you can track the comments on your favorite sites, your comments with replies, and your Fytch friends list.

Using a feature called Fytch channels, you can find sites based on category as opposed to a specific URL. For example, there are channels like "Sports," "Computers and the Web," "Travel and Going Out," etc. Supposedly, you can track topics with a special button but - call us blind - we didn't see it. Instead, Channel pages seem to feature Digg-like voting buttons for promoting comments up or voting them down.

Also, when browsing the specific channel's page, if you click on a particular headline, you'll see options to add that site to either "My Favorites" or "My Radar." Unfortunately, these choices are a bit confusing since there doesn't seem to be a specific section of the pop-up dashboard for tracking favorites (it's only on the website itself), and clicking "My Radar" will actually have you then tracking the comments by that user on the site, not all the comments on the site itself.

More useful is the "Add Website to My Radar" option, which lets you enter in the URL of a site to track instead. We wish an option to track a website would be added to the main Fytch toolbar, though.

Finally, on the Fytch website, a section called "The Pulse" tracks hot topics in a hand-picked list of sites with a lot of Fytcher comments.

Issues and Challenges

Although you have the option to choose between English and German on the site's homepage, this preference doesn't copy over to the comments themselves as you browse around the site's Channels. That means you'll end up seeing a lot of comments in the language you didn't choose. For now, German seems to be more popular - probably because the company is based there.

Another problem we experienced was removing a user we were tracking in Fytch. Although the user appeared on our My Fytch page, going to their profile didn't give us the option to "unfollow" them, only the option to follow them (but we already were!). As it turns out, the "remove" option for deleting sites and users is tucked away under a small "edit" button on the main My Fytch page. We think that's something that should be more prominently placed on the pop-up dashboard.

While Fytch does make it easy to leave comments on any website, it faces the same challenges of any new startup relying on user-inputted data: it needs more users before it really becomes attractive. Besides, the majority of the sites you would want to track have their own commenting systems already built-in. Unless you feel you're being heavily censored there, you may not see the value in using Fytch instead, especially since your comments would be seen by a much smaller audience.

However, we like the way Fytch has implemented their service - a bookmarklet! Finally, a company that thinks the browser itself is the future, not another downloadable app. Since they're still in beta, we'll give them time to work out the other kinks we mentioned. If you want to try Fytch yourself, you can sign up here.

Installing Echo is just as easy as installing the plugins of its competitors like Intense Debate or Disqus - which is dealing with a major spam problem these days. JS-Kit provides plugins for WordPress and Blogger, as well as a code-snippet for other blogging platforms.

The Best Things in Life Aren't Free

It's important to point out, though, that the most interesting features, including real-time updates and comment aggregation from third-party sites like Twitter and FriendFeed are not available in the free version of Echo. The free version includes most of the core features of Echo, including the ability to share comments on Twitter and Facebook, nested replies, moderation tools, and customization.

For $98 a year, paying users will get access to Echo's aggregation features and real-time updates. JS-Kit also offers a white-label solution with priority support, as well as OEM integration.

It's good to see some development in the blog commenting market again. After a flurry of announcement and product releases last year, development and new product releases markedly slowed down this year, even though the growth of Twitter and Facebook only intensified the problem of comment fragmentation.

Mollom, the spam-filtering startup that eliminates comment and post spam on popular content management systems, just reached two important milestones: it processed 100,000,000 messages and is now actively protecting over 10,000 websites.

Even more impressive is that these statistics are for Mollom's public servers only and don't include message processing on private servers operated for large-volume clients, such as Netlog, an online social portal for European youth.

Mollom set up dedicated servers in Netlog's data center to provide automated around-the-clock monitoring and custom-trained content classifiers. Mollom's servers analyze more than 50 messages per second for Netlog, adding up to an additional 4 million messages per day that are not counted in the latest milestone.

Large sites such as Netlog are turning increasingly to Mollom for its ability to filter spam in near real-time. Another site, popular citizen journalism hub NowPublic, had been receiving almost 25,000 spam posts per day before implementing Mollom's service. After NowPublic installed Mollom, the number of legitimate comments by users jumped 180%, while spam comments fell to nearly zero.

Taking into account the traffic from the 10,000 websites that Mollom protects, Mollom currently processes up to 150 million messages a month, making it one of the largest website spam filtering services available today.

But Mollom is not content to rest on its past achievements. The company is currently changing the architecture of its back-end, which will make the software learn faster and make its actions easier to debug, analyze, and oversee.

Mollom offers its services in tiers, with products targeted at small blogs, mid-sized sites, and large enterprise-level Web properties. Mollom Free, designed for small blogs and sites with small posting volumes, is provided free of charge to the Web community, while Mollom Plus and Mollom Premium are commercial services designed for sites with higher volumes and reliability requirements. More information about its service plans is available on Mollom's website.

For those who are widely loved, you'll see this as a blessing. For those who are widely loathed, you'll see the full wrath of the internet in colorful cross-platform commentary. Echo further transcends existing commenting systems with the incorporation of HTML, photo and video. This appears to be a truly amazing tool for mash up contests, political debates and global events.

Loux said, "When Robert Scoble saw this his response was, 'blogging is back'." Scoble's own Building 43 project aggregates comments into the Community 43 page from various social media sources using hashtags. However, where Scoble's community dialogue gets buried as new media comes in, Echo produces a live feed that stays visible with the source material. Chris Saad, VP of Product Strategy and Community, said,"We look for links back to the source page inside tweets/FriendFeed etc and bring in the related conversation - in real time."

This evolving stream of truth (good and bad) is about to stare us in the face every time we visit our pages. It will be interesting to see how this will affect blogging as we know it. Do you think bloggers will elevate their game to gain accolades or simply become gratuitously extreme in order to stir conversation? To reserve an Echo subscription, visit the JS-Kit site.

The Web is changing. In today's world, user participation can make or break a site. Allowing users to react, participate, and contribute while keeping your site under control can be a huge challenge. If poor-quality content or spam hits your website, it can undermine your site's search engine listing, damage your brand and reputation, and degrade your visitors' experience. Good user-contributed content, meanwhile, can add a lot of value to your site, which translates into more activity, improved stickiness, and more and better monetization opportunities. As the Web continues to become more social, more websites will need a strategy to deal with spam and unwanted content.

The addition of these social features has brought the problem of spam. Two major challenges arise from trying to control website spam. First, visitors may lose their motivation to comment or contribute content because they are required so often to prove that they are human and not spam by registering. This erodes participation.

Secondly, whether visitors are asked to register or not, site moderation becomes more time-consuming and expensive. Website moderators have to scan comments and other content to find spam instead of interact with the community. And publishing companies have to pay for more site moderators to deal with all the spam on their sites.

NowPublic is a Vancouver-based news network that mobilizes an army of reporters to cover events around the world. During Hurricane Katrina, NowPublic had more reporters in affected areas than most news organizations have on their entire staff. NowPublic was up against as many as 25,000 spam attempts a day, so it needed a solution that would allow the site to grow faster and more effectively without being slowed by comment spam.

A year ago, NowPublic implemented Mollom, a Web service that protects blogs, social networks, and communities against spam and other unwanted content. Within 12 months, the company had become one of the fastest-growing news organizations in the world, with thousands of reporters in more than 140 countries. In addition to this growth in reporters, NowPublic saw an 180% increase in the average number of comments posted per month by users since implementing Mollom's spam-filtering service.

"Integrating Mollom in NowPublic's systems was quick and easy," says Michael Meyers, co-founder and CTO of NowPublic. "It took only a few hours, and the API service has been fast and 100% reliable. By the end of the first month, we saved more in-person hours alone than Mollom cost us for the year."

Mollom has prevented more than one million spam attempts since it started protecting NowPublic. But NowPublic uses Mollom for more than just comment spam. It uses it to identify bogus profiles, vet new account sign-ups, and protect forums.

Mollom, in effect, removed a major barrier to visitor participation for NowPublic, allowing readers to comment anonymously. "Mollom has been a critical ingredient in our success," adds Michael Tippett, co-founder and CMO. "It has allowed us to open our comments to anonymous users while limiting the ability of spammers to vandalize our site. This has helped us grow our page views and truly tap into the wisdom of crowds."

Mollom also allows NowPublic's website maintainers and editors to focus on providing content instead of removing spam. "Since NowPublic began using Mollom," says Jordan Yerman, NowPublic's Contributor Support Manager, "I've saved at least an hour per day dealing with spam in stories, profiles, comments, etc. Thanks to Mollom, I can be more pro-active than reactive. I have more time to engage and interact with our users."

Other major publishers using Mollom to protect their websites from spam are Sony Music, Warner Bros Records, Netlog, The Economist, Fox Interactive, and the New York Observer.

Visit mollom.com to download Mollom's spam filtering service for your website.

But "hanging out with people online" is supposed to be the promise and the potential of social media today, not something from days gone by...so what's going wrong here? Have the trolls ruined social media for good?

In our culture, celebrity-bashing has almost become a sport of sorts. Entire web sites have been set to profit from the game of picking on those far-more-fortunate than ourselves. From Perez Hilton's gossip blog to smaller sites focused on celeb's style (or lack thereof) to the paparazzi pic-filled giants like TMZ, our guilty pleasure of celeb-watching has turned into the much guiltier pleasure of celeb-hating.

That hate has extended out from the traditional gossipy sites to the very platforms and pages that the celebs themselves maintain. In Stephenie's Meyer's case, that was her MySpace page. At one time, Myer was credited as having made excellent use of social media, notes the Christian Science Monitor. She was responsive to fans and even credits some of her novels success to the friendly and positive community she built there.

But as her fame grew, so did the backlash. After several imitators posed as her online in an attempt to deceive fans, Meyer finally just called it quits. "It was a lot of fun while it lasted, and I really miss the early days when I could hang out with people online. Many of you are hilarious and insightful, and I wish it was easier for me to talk to everyone the way I used to," she writes on her personal web site.

In Meyer's case, it sounds like she made the mistake of thinking she could manage social media on her own, but at her level of fame, she could have really benefited from the help of a public relations team who specialized in social media. Let them handle the Facebook fan page and Twitter account, deal with the trolls, moderate the comments, etc. Unfortunately for her fans, she just quit.

But cases like those from Reznor and Meyer may just be the canary in the coal mine of social media. As tons of celebs flock to Twitter in an effort to regain control of their image and express themselves online, they may be in for a rude awakening when they have to deal with the vitriol and hate spewed towards them from those that resent their position...or from those who frankly just get their kicks from making others feel bad.

How Can We Fix This?

But what can be done to resolve this? Reznor thinks that Twitter needs more blocking mechanisms, but it's possible the problem goes deeper than that. Blocking the bad guys is just a band-aid on this situation. What we really need is a way to force the trolls out into the light.

This could be easily accomplished by simply putting an end to online anonymity - a trend that hasn't quite arrived yet. You see, if you're allowed to leave a comment with no name, no email, and no other unique identifier, then you have a free pass to be as hateful and rude as you like. It's a blank slates with no consequences. While there are some cases where anonymous comments make sense, when engaging in social media activities - be them blogs, social networks, Twitter, etc. - it's just not productive to allow the anonymous trolls to disrupt what's otherwise an often productive and insightful discussion.

As much as some may rail against the lock-in and closed nature of Facebook, the promise of Facebook Connect is that it could address this problem. Finally, people could identify themselves online and have to stand behind their words.

We've heard, too, that Twitter is flirting with the idea of verified accounts. Maybe they should consider extending that option beyond just the public figures and come up with a system that lets everyone verify their account by linking it to their other online profiles.

Online anonymity is just a leftover from the early days of the web - a time when there really just weren't other options. You just created a handle, set up an account, and began to write. Now that we have the tools to identify each other, shouldn't we begin to use them?

Think of all the problems it would solve - not only would it address troll behavior but it would also out the marketers and advertisers who were manipulating the user reviews and ratings on sites like Yelp and Amazon. It would let you know if that blog commenter who disagreed with an article or hated a product had a secret agenda (like maybe they worked for a competitor?). Maybe it would actually put an end to such behavior, allowing the forums of social media to finally be returned to those who just wanted to discuss, communicate, and connect.

What do you think? Leave your comments, anonymous (sigh) or otherwise below.

Update: Join a FriendFeed Discussion on the topic - here or here.

The comment feature is also available in the mobile version of Google Reader.

As of now, the comments you make in Google Reader remain in Google's silo and won't be syndicated back to the original blog. It is not clear if Google will give developers access to these comments so that they can create plugins that aggregate these Google Reader comments and display them on the original post or on an aggregation service like FriendFeed. In the announcement, however, the Google Reader team stresses that it wants to give its users the ability to have private conversations.

Google has been relatively slow to add social features to Google Reader and most of the discussions around shared items now happen on other services like FriendFeed and Facebook. It will be interesting to see if users will actually use this new feature in large numbers, but it is definitely an interesting addition to Google Reader. In the announcement, Google specifically mentions that it has "much more planned for this feature," and we can't help but wonder if Google is planning to allow users to comment on any item in Google Reader (similar to the SearchWiki functionality in its search engine).

Competition

The market for commenting services has become quite competitive lately. Yahoo, for example, just announced an alliance with JS-Kit yesterday, and Facebook also just released a commenting plugin based on Facebook Connect as its first social widget. Other competitors of IntenseDebate are obviously Disqus, which already offers integration with Seesmic, and Google's Friend Connect. None of these, however, offer the extensibility that IntenseDebate's new plugins now offer.

Adding these plugins looks like a smart move on IntenseDebate's part. Not only can it now tap into a pool of talented coders (and possibly hire the best ones in the long run), but - once more plugins become available -  it will also be able to offer its users new features that none of its competitors offer. At the same time, this also allows the IntenseDebate team to focus on its own core product and the stability and speed of its service.

What Would You Add?

If you could write a plugin to extend your favorite commenting platform, which features would you add?

Google, of course, already offers a similar service with Google Friend Connect, though this offers far more features than just the ability to leave comments. Google also allows users to sign in with an OpenID account, as well as with accounts from other vendors, including Yahoo and AOL. In the announcement, Facebook stresses that this is just the first of a number of social widgets based on Facebook Connect that the company is planning to release in the near future.

It is important to note that other commenting services like JS-Kit already allow users to use their Facebook Connect logins - something that Facebook actually acknowledges in its announcement.

Features

Publishers will be able to customize the widget and moderate comments, though it is not clear what this moderation will look like. Users without a Facebook Connect ID will also be able to leave comments, but we will have to wait and see how well Facebook's widget will be able handle the inevitable spam that will come with this.

One nice feature of the Facebook Connect widget is that your comments are not only posted to your Facebook profile, but that additional comments that your friends make on Facebook in reference to your comment will also appear on the originating site. This, as Nick O'Neill points out, is similar to what a number of blog plugins like IntenseDebate are doing with comments left on Friendfeed right now. For publishers, this also means that their content is going to get a wider exposure on Facebook.

However, while being able to use the Facebook Connect ID to sign into a comments system is nice, most publishers are probably looking for a system that can handle a wider range of sign-on credentials. Facebook is now a member of the OpenID Foundation, but the widget only supports Facebook Connect IDs.

Breaking out of the Silo

What is most important about this announcement, though, is that Facebook continues to open up its platform to third parties. Earlier this month, third-party developers got access to users' status updates, notes, and links. Now, Facebook is allowing bloggers and publishers to implement some of Facebook's core features outside of Facebook's own site. Facebook use to be a closed off silo, but this is changing rapidly right now and it will be interesting to see how Facebook's users will react to this.

Encouraged Commentary currently offers three compelling features:

First, highlighting any section of a post avails a "respond" button that allows users to immediately comment. Clicking respond grabs the highlighted text and adds it - in blockquote - to the content of the comment, simply and easily referencing the exact passage that the user is discussing.

Second, working with comments, themselves, offers additional functionality. Highlighting and clicking respond within a comment automatically establishes the familiar "@user" addressing to make the intended recipient aware of the conversation directed at him/her. The highlighted text, again, is brought into the comment for reference.

Third, the connections among comments are tracked. Mousing over any commenter's name reveals a list of his or her other comments in the thread. Clicking on list items allows users to "jump between related comments and responses quickly" - something that threaded conversations have been working to capture. Reply and Quote buttons allow the user to jump into the conversation without highlighting.

Granted, the young project is not without its rough spots. Users are reporting issues with IE (shocking, I realize). And some of the implementation of the concepts could use refinement. No doubt that will come as more people engage in the project.

But those issues are easily overlooked. Because what is most compelling about this approach is the natural conversational dynamic that Jeffers has captured. You do what seems natural: highlight and respond. And you do so with context. That dynamic provides both Encouraged Commentary with content and the "hooks" to track the history of the conversation without adversely impacting the user. What's more, it provides a series of reference points that encourages new users to enter the discussion - and to do so just as easily as the conversation began.

If we see widespread adoption of this sort of thinking, it's quite possible that we may see the conversation returning to comments.

To see Encouraged Commentary in action or to try it yourself, visit Don't Trust This Guy, Jeffers' blog. To download the source code, visit the Encouraged Commentary project on GitHub.

Izea, formerly known as PayPerPost, has a pretty sketchy history, but also a lot of users. Izea is a "social media marketing" company that pays bloggers small amounts of money for posting blog posts about Izea's advertisers. Izea's PayPerPost product especially came under heavy fire from bloggers in its early days, as it didn't require disclosure of the advertising content from its bloggers and was generally seen as misleading. Even today, there are still questions about Izea's disclosure policy.

SezWho is going to work with Izea's SocialSpark, a marketplace and community which connects advertisers with bloggers who are willing to write sponsored posts. SocialSpark will start using SezWho to provide its users with a way of tracking blog comments and reputation.

Given that Google has already banned all PayPerPost users by indexing them with a Pagerank of zero, it seems Izea is interested in creating a different ratings system for its users by leveraging SezWho's technology.

Entrecard

Entrecard provides bloggers with a blog-to-blog advertising widget and will give SezWho users who receive ratings of 4 stars or more with credits to advertise on its network of blogs. This is an interesting approach, as it connects reputation with a direct reward. Through this deal, Entrecard will get a stronger foothold among bloggers who are already working with SezWho and probably hopes that SezWho's users will return to actually buy real advertising after having tried out the free ads.

Creative Weblogging

SezWho's deal with Creative Weblogging, an international blog network, is probably the most straightforward of these announcements. Creative Weblogging will enable SezWho's technology among its network of blogs. SezWho advertises that it can greatly increase the number of comments on blogs. This is something the Creative Weblogging network could definitely use, as most of its blogs are currently getting close to zero comments on average.

SezWho

Overall, this is an interesting, yet somewhat desperate, move by SezWho. In terms of publicity, it has been in the shadow of similar ventures like Disqus and Intense Debate. By adding a number of more formal and visible partners, SezWho looks like it is trying to gain back a bit of mind share among publishers.

At the same time, though, at least two of the partners they have chosen, Izea and Creative Weblogging, don't exactly have great reputations. Izea has a history of deceptive advertising and a lot of content on Creative Weblogging looks rather spammy, too (though there are also a few good blogs in the network as well). Entrecard, while an interesting service, is also mostly a niche player, which will probably get a lot more out of this partnership than SezWho itself.

Maybe It's Just Not Useful?

For one thing, this functionality is built into the Mini-Feed (the feed on a user's profile page) as opposed to the News Feed (the stream of all your friends' updates), which means you only have the ability to add a comment if you're visiting a friend's profile directly - a place where you already have many options for commenting - like the Wall, for example.

Also, unlike FriendFeed, which this feature is obviously modeled after, comments don't cause the news item to bubble up to the top, so it's possible you could miss seeing the comments. This could especially be an issue if you log in and do a lot of activities - like adding applications, joining groups, and friending others - before glancing at your Mini-Feed. All your latest activities will still be at the top of your feed, while the commented-on item(s) will have fallen further down the page.

You aren't alerted about the new comments, either, like you are with application notifications, so there's even more of a chance that they can be missed.

Yet all that wouldn't matter so much if this meta-commenting was actually a feature users were clamoring for. But are they? Outside the early adopter set, commenting on updates and posted items in this manner may not really be an activity that many people care about.

Do Mainstream Facebook Users Get It?

When explaining the feature to a few mainstream Facebookers to see what they thought, the responses were just lukewarm. Obviously, this wasn't a scientific survey, but their reactions could possibly be indicative of the typical Facebook user mindset: Why comment on a feed item about a photo upload when you can just comment on the photo itself? Why leave your friend a comment they could miss when you can write on their wall...which they are notified about?

With these questions in mind, we wonder if it is possible that the commenting feature hasn't taken off yet not because it wasn't visible, but because most Facebook users don't really find the feature that useful? What do you think?