Many of you posted questions in the comments, and having to keep checking back to see if anyone has posted a reply can be tedious and time-consuming. Instead, you can now subscribe to a comment thread when you post a reply; any subsequent comments will generate a notification that is e-mailed to you, keeping you up to date. The e-mail will also contain a link to where you can manage all the threads you are subscribed to and remove yourself from any subscriptions, so you have full control over what e-mails you receive. So don’t be afraid to use this feature!

The feature is disabled/unchecked by default until you enable it. This means it is purely an opt-in subscription, to prevent connotations of spam, which we all hate. I have tried it out and it appears to be working, but let me know if you have any problems.

Future changes

I had considered going with a third-party/centralized fully-featured commenting system like DISQUS or IntenseDebate, since they offered other nice things such as threading, replying and much more user control over things. Additionally, the idea of your comments on one blog being part of your overall “identity” on the web expands the discussion and appeals to many active participants. From what I’ve seen of DISQUS on other sites, it appears to be very appealing.

However, I wasn’t sure of what direction things would move in after moving to a third-party commenting system, or what would happen to comments stored there. Recently, IntenseDebate was acquired by Automattic, the startup behind WordPress.com and the open source WordPress project, which of course powers this blog.

Since then, IntenseDebate has become an invite-only service. (if only temporarily) One would expect tighter integration with WordPress.com and IntenseDebate, but I’m not sure how this will affect the standalone WordPress with respect to whether IntenseDebate will work “better” with it than DISQUS. I am going to wait a while to see how this all plays out before making a move, but I expect to move to one of these systems in the future

There are already many blogging services out there, with most of them more fully-featured than Facebook’s Notes service, so what makes this significant? Well, first of all, Facebook basically has a monopoly on the university and college social networking scene, so the addition of any service carries some relevance right away. Furthermore, they’ve added an RSS import feature, allowing users with existing blogs to syndicate/re-display their blog entries in Facebook Notes with ease. Most online blogging services already include feeds, so this step should be compatible with most services existing user are already on, and it provides a nice transition path. Furthermore, imported feeds include a link back to the original site, providing an incentive for users wanting to increase traffic back to their site.

What’s even better is that you can easily add tags to an entry, describing who the entry relates to. The field for this has been nicely enhanced with Ajax, so as you type a list of matching friends pops up, to facilitate autocomplete. You can also see a list of Note entries that were tagged with your name. One of the things Facebooks is really good at, is helping people find other people with similar interests, and this is possible because of the great use of metadata they’ve undertaken. Tagging entries is just another way they’re improving this.

One thing some people are worrying about is that this might be seen as a signal that Facebook is moving towards MySpace in terms of how they want people to use the site, with more and more customized user content. One thing that has thankfully separated Facebook from MySpace is the lack of user-customizable layouts and colours on profiles. MySpace’s liberal allowances for user-customized profiles has resulted in blatantly awful sites that combine the worst colour combinations with site-stretching pictures and horrible embedded sounds and music, making it look worse than the Geocities of the late 90’s. Let’s hope Facebook keeps the layout rigid and clean, so that it’s possible to browse the site without losing your eyes.

Luckily, the folks over at Microsoft have realized this and are making attempts to change this. The markup the beta version generates is not perfect yet, but they admit this and are working to fix this. Currently, the beta of Word 2007 supports posting to services like Blogger and MSN Spaces (of course), among a few others, but the coolest thing is that Microsoft should be providing an API for the posting service, so it’s conceivable that platforms like WordPress (which I use for this site) could have plugins available that make posting from Word a reality. Once the bugs are worked out, and customization of the markup it outputs is made available, I think it could work.

However, I’m pretty happy with the editor in WordPress right now; it’s TinyMCE, and for the most part it works quite well at generating sensible markup.