Late last night, the blog All Facebook noticed that Facebook had significantly updated their Comments social plugin. Facebook hadn’t announced the changes, but there they were. And sure enough, today they’ve confirmed that they are testing out some significant updates on their own blogs, and promises that they’ll have more to share shortly.
Here’s Facebook’s full statement:
We’re currently testing a new comments plugin on the Facebook Blog and Facebook Developer Blog that incorporates feedback from users and developers and features around authenticity, social relevance, ranking, and distribution. We’ll have more to share in the coming weeks.
It sounds as if this upgrade is a part of CEO Mark Zuckerberg promises will be a busy few months worth of new things from Facebook. Last week’s new Facebook Groups were the first of those updates, but there will be more.
So what’s new? Comment counts, feedback, threading, voting, and a few other things. It looks as if Facebook is gearing up to enter the commenting space in a serious way.
That won’t be good news to the dozen or so startups working in this space (we use Disqus, for example). Many of those guys rely on Facebook for authentication, and if the new plugin is good enough, some content partners may choose to cut out the middle man, as it were. Apparently, we’ll be hearing more soon.