The latest practical news and developments at the intersection of search, email,
social media, mobile marketing, web analytics, online advertising, ecommerce and more.
Facebook has launched a Comment Box widget, which webmasters can use to encourage conversation on their site.
Comment Box enables clients to add a conversational component to their sites. Additionally, people that also use Facebook can also post those comments on their profiles and share them with friends, enabling the discussion to travel.
The service is part of Facebook Connect, a developer-targeting feature that enables websites to port the activities of their customers onto users' Facebook Newsfeeds.
Instructions for setting up a Comment Box are as follows (via the Facebook developers blog):
1. Set up a basic Connect application. Take note of the API key and specify a callback URL to your website.
2. Download this cross-domain receiver file, and upload it to your website.
Add these snippets of code to each file where you want a Comments Box.
Within the < html > tag, add: xmlns:fb="http://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml"
Add the following code wherever you want a Comments Box to appear in your page. Replace '''YOUR_API_KEY_HERE''' with your API key, and include the path to the cross-domain receiver.
View the script at the blog. The following video also walks users through the process:
