Friday, April 26, 2013

Google Comments - The Right Way

So I occasionally head over to theciviccommons.com to catch up on some of the conversations and projects they are nurturing.  I like the concept that they are trying to build a community around engaging in civil discussion especially when we disagree.

Today I made a comment on a post and it was cross posted to Facebook by Jill Miller-Zimon. I happened to be logged into Facebook at the time as was pleased to see 4 or 5 comments and responses come in  a short period of time.  All very interesting and informative.  Unfortunately, the comments don't show up on theciviccommons.com.

Google recently announced the availability of Google Plus Comments integration with Blogger, the service I use to host this blog. In a recent post, I tried out this new capability.

The post is in Japanese but although you may not be able to read it you can see the comments on it: google plus comments post. On the post I commented directly on the blog post. In addition I commented on from within Google Plus. As you can see the comments show up both on the post itself as well as in the Google Plus post(Google Plus).

From my perspective, Google implemented this right. As a producer of content or a site I don't want all the comment traffic sent to a different site or facebook, or google plus for that matter. However, the reality is there are more people on Facebook and Google Plus and they tend to generate a lot of comments. The way Google has implemented it means that the dialog can happen in two places but it is one dialog or conversation.

Of course it doesn't get us all the way there. I happened to use Blogger, another Google service so the solution isn't really cross platform. However, according to a quick Google search I discovered that folks have published google plus comment plugins for Drupal and Wordpress. See the Drupal Plugin and the Wordpress Plugin.

Now,I don't know if Facebook's commenting system allows the same thing. The superficial search I did seems to suggest that the same capabilities are indeed possible. At least to a certain degree. Now the real goal would be to create a system that could integrate those to different systems. So a comment I leave on my blog gets posted to both Google Plus and to Facebook, comments from Facebook get posted to the blog and Google Plus. Obviously, Google Plus comments would be added to the blog and to facebook.

Now talk about an echo chamber!

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