When building out Appleseed, I decided on a principle early on that's important for a sense of social... well, not privacy, that's not the right word. Segmentation, more like it.

But first, humans rely on segmentation. I want to know that if I'm hanging out in a bar with a bunch of friends, I can talk a certain way that I would never talk around my parents or my extended family. If a member of that social group walks into the bar, it's awkward, but on some level, they opened that pandora's box, by encroaching on my social space.

Facebook doesn't seem to understand that, preferring instead to just dump everything into one box labelled "Social!" and forgetting that you interact with your friends different from your family, your coworkers, etc.

So for Appleseed, the principle I'm focusing on is that, when you report to your friends, you report on contexts, not actions.

So, when you upload a photo, or post a journal entry, or a status update, you're creating context, and the appropriate friends are notified of that context.

However, when you comment on that context, you are taking an action. The recipients of that context are notified, but your friends are not (unless they're already mutual friends of the context owner).

In other words, Alice posts a journal entry to her College Buddies friends circle. Bob comments on that journal entry. Alice's College Buddies friends circle is notified of Bob's comment, but Bob's friends are not notified unless they are also one of Alice's College Buddies.

This isn't perfect, someone so inclined can still search for your comments and find them, provided the privacy settings are open enough. But let's as least make stalking require an extra action, instead of doing it for the user.

My /etc/hosts file already blocks Facebook's widgets, so I don't see anything in the comments section on TechCrunch. That's a feature and improvement as far as I'm concerned.

TechCrunch kind of hinted at it, but I will never use Facebook to leave a comment on a website (or log-into a site for that matter). I keep my Facebook account separate from everything because I don't trust Zuck whatsoever.

Update: in addition to blocking in /etc/hosts, I run Facebook Disconnect in Chrome which gets rid of all those Like buttons and other annoyances that run on the main Facebook domain and can't be blocked in /etc/hosts without also blocking your access to Facebook directly. It's a fantastic extension.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ejpepffjfmamnambag...

I feel really bad about this. I'll explain.

Every person has different "social roles" in real life (for friends, business associates, hobby, etc.). But I have only one FB account. With single avatar pic. Imagine leaving a comment on some business related website using this system while I have FB avatar of me on some crazy college drunk party. When I'm socializing on FB website only that's OK, but when you try to go out, that's a big problem. We need a better way to manage our social roles.

Lack of pseudonyms is going to be a real stumbling block for this.

When I'm conversing with a real person (ie, on Facebook, Twitter or IM) then I'm ok using my real name because there are privacy controls.

When I'm discussing things on HN or TechCrunch, I don't want my opinions being misconstrued out of context... given this society's litigious nature, I think FB comments are not going to take over Disqus/IntenseDebate's market, though they might carve out a nice niche.

I'm very much against this. Facebook does not need a piece of every aspect of our online life. I much prefer Disqus because 1) they aren't facebook and 2) they are way more useful in terms of commenting because it allows you to keep certain opinions off of facebook.

Facebook already has a big brother vibe to it--a feeling echoed by many others I know--why do they keep going further with this sort of thing?

Appear to be uncrawlable by Google/Bing - the closing of the web accelerates, sadly with the full consent and cooperation of users and websites.

Seems like the comments can not be indexed by Google so it seems bad if you want to the comments to help with your SEO efforts.

I don't know about everyone else, but this is the first time in a while where TC comments are actually readable, and are not troll-ridden. This is a good thing.

To understand the scene on comments, here's a This Week in Startups episode with Daniel Ha, founder of Disqus.

http://thisweekin.com/thisweekin-startups/this-week-in-start...

Starts at 00:15:00

When you think about it from the perspective of big sites like TechCrunch, requiring that people use their true Facebook identity would virtually eliminate nasty comments overnight. When you're using your true identity people will generally behave a lot better.

If that was the only motive behind Facebook comments I could easily get on board with that, but inevitably Facebook will find deviant and lucrative purposes for the information they gather.

The "advantage" FB has is that comments on a 3rd party site get posted to your FB page, and replies to those comments on FB go back to the 3rd party page. I'm not sure that's really that big of an advantage - some may consider it a disadvantage..

Great, trading one slow loading invasive comment system that my plugins block (disqus) for another slow loading invasive comment system that my plugins already block.

Nothing like progress.

Widget block: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hgiihiookhijpbhafl...

Disconnect: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jeoacafpbcihiomhla...

Can someone explain the appeal of using this over something with support for pseudonyms?

Facebook Comments won't touch the ID/Echo/Disqus market share on dominant websites and popular blogs, but it will totally take over the long tail.

With no comment karma or other means of emphasizing the important content, the new Facebook comments plugin is going to totally kill commenting on popular websites like TechCrunch (which, amazingly, is testing it right now. The first post got >1000 comments. With such amounts it's just a lot of noise. If you are big, do it like they do it on Slashdot or don't do it at all!

On the other hand, it can be a real killer feature for small sites that normally would have zero or very few comments, with all interactions moving to Facebooks and Twitters or the world. Now with Facebook Comments, it can stay on Facebook and you don't care as you're still getting your comments back on your blog and the more people share it and comment on it, the bigger chance you get to attract new readers. Amazing opportunity!

What's needed is a browser extension that blocks the facebook comments iframe from reading my facebook session. I currently block their various tracking widgets using the widget block extension, which prevents them from ever being loaded, as they are worthless. But this way I won't ever be able to see the facebook comments at all, which will be aggravating if they become as common as disqus for example. Regrettably that isn't unlikely.

So we need a way of appearing to not have a facebook session when displaying the facebook comments widget on other sites, but not interfering with facebook proper.

This will propagate a new wave of facebook trolls who will create accounts with specific demographics and make vulgar comments in hopes to 1) troll, and 2) make said demographic look bad. Problem is now we can't even tell if they are real or not!

I think there is a greasemonkey script in the making to disable the defaulting of the post on facebook tickbox.

In the rare occasion my non-tech friends want to see comments I made on something, I think I can manage to tick the box.

Blocking Facebook in Adblock is the gift that keeps on giving.

No need to resort to an additional mod when all you need to do is toss the following in Adblock:

||facebook.com/

||facebook.net/

||fbcdn.com/

||fbcdn.net/

What's so terrible about the comment system that comes with wordpress?

So what are Disqus's plans now?

But I'm already invested in my Disqus account and I prefer their pseudo-anonymity approach, also I don't have yahoo nor facebook accounts.