Facebook Connect Will Now Compete With Disqus? Too Dangerous Competitor

Reading the blogosphere coverage of both Google and Facebook launching their own data portability programs - Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect - I realized one thing: there is at least one type of services that can be seriously damaged by general availability of both programs to website owners - those working in the blog commenting field, like Disqus or IntenseDebate recently acquired by Wordpress maker Automattic.

I have already mentioned in my own piece on the subject that I have a feeling that Facebook Connect will get much more traction among webmasters for a simple reason of helping them get an additional distribution channel that could let their sites potentially reach millions upon millions of Facebook users and convert some of those Facebook users seeing their friends interact with the sites into regular visitors of such third-party websites as well.

The viral growth effect is very similar to what you get when you ask your visitors to bookmark your site on Delicious or vote for it on Digg - but in this case you will only have to ask users once if they want their activities on the site to be sent back to Facebook and broadcasted to all their friends on the social network via news feeds. So once the confirmation is here every time a user performs an action on the site, the site owner will get some additional free visibility - what really can be more appealing for web publishers?

We all know that an owner of any website will hardly want to avoid using an additional marketing channel to promote the website where your own visitors will help you get extra visibility for your content. And of course blogges are no exception, especially those blogging professionally and trying to get any extra monetizable traffic we can so I’d expect bloggers more than willing to support Facebook Connect program.

And it is quite understandable: after all, usually your post only has chances of appearing on Facebook when you write something particularly good that people will find interesting enough to share with their friends - but that takes a couple of extra steps, including your reader thinking about actually helping you promote your content and posting it to Facebook. But if you support Facebook Connect in commenting functionality of your blog, your readers will be able to help your content get some extra visibility every time they leave a comment using Facebook for their credentials. I expect we will see Facebook Connect plugins for popular blogging platforms launched pretty soon for every blogger to be able to implement the functionality easily on a blog.

And we have already seen the first examples in the blogosphere. Techcrunch was very quick in getting into the list of initial launch partners for Facebook Connect. Now every time a Techcrunch visitor wants to leave a comment on a blog post, this visitor will be able to sign in to leave a comment with his or her Facebook account - instead of going the usual route of typing your name, email, and website URL. As a result, this comment can be sent right to your Facebook news feed for everyone to see that you have found one Techcrunch post to be interesting enough to leave a comment on it.

I see one problem here because of the fact that many people still believe in blog comments for marketing and promotion. Everyone knows that people will often leave comments on widely-read blogs only to get a few people click through to their own sites. But the irony here is that if you choose to use Facebook Connect to leave a comment on Techcrunch, you will help Techcrunch with distribution of their content to your friends on Facebook but you will hardly get any visitors in return as you usually expect - so internet marketers will likely prefer to stick to the usual name/URL/email way. But the people that use Facebook for promotion and viral growth of their sites will probably be very willing to use Facebook Connect to leave a comment - hoping to get some new friends on the social network after they “discover” you in Techcrunch commenting section.

At the same time I see a huge opportunity here for some blogs with strict commenting policy requiring people to log in to their own communities to be able to leave comments and I am really looking forward to such blogs eliminating this restriction and using Facebook Connect for login instead (or in addition to their existing accounts). One example is CNET where despite of the huge readership they can hardly brag about lots of comments they receive - for one simple reason of making users create an account and log in to CNET every time this visitor wants to leave a comment. I have already lost the password to my initial commenting account on CNET and had to create a new one because for some reason I could never restore my password - and that has been bothering me enough to only rarely leave a comment on CNET, usually only when I absolutely can not keep silence.

From a disclosure in Rafe Needleman’s post about Facebook Connect we got to know that CNET (with the publisher CBS) will use Facebook Connect to log in and I am definitely more than happy that I will be able to leave comments on CNET using my Facebook credentials as this is way more appealing than using the very impersonal CNET user profile, in my opinion. And I really don’t mind sending the worthy content I leave comments on to my friends via their news feed on Facebook.

But of course there are services that must be worried already with Disqus blog commenting widget being one of them. After all, what’s the point for a blogger to stick to Disqus when using Facebook Connect will provide them with a new marketing channel where their readers will help bloggers promote the content that they find interesting enough to leave a comment on. So I’d expect many professional blogs adding Facebook Connect functionality in the nearest days while dedicated blog commenting services like Disqus should really think about supporting Facebook Connect themselves - at least to keep the bloggers they already work with happy with their commenting functionality instead of returning to standard commenting functionality with Facebook Connect supported.

In the meanwhile I invite you to join Profy blog network on Facebook and follow me on Disqus as well.