Facebook has announced a new milestone for its Comments Box plugin: more than 300,000 websites have implemented it so far. That’s an impressive number for a product that has been available for about four months: the Comments Box was released on March 1, 2011. By April 12, 2011, it was being used on more than 50,000 sites. We can thus surmise that adoption has recently accelerated and the plugin is being accepted as a viable comments solution.
In response to partner feedback, Facebook has added two new features to make it easier for moderators and users to control how comments are displayed: boosting comments and chronological sort.
Boosting comments allows moderators to ensure that high-quality comments appear at the top of the Comments Box. This feature is particularly useful for website owners that want to highlight one or more particularly interesting comments in response to an article or editorial to help spark an interesting conversation.
Chronological sort allows users to rearrange comments to show the most recent conversations first. This feature is particularly useful for readers who want to experience commentary in real-time, especially for viewing the latest comments on an event that is being streamed live.
As you can see in the screenshot above, when you click on the downward facing arrow on the Comments Box plugin, you now see three sorting options: Chronological, Reverse Chronological, Social Ranking. The first two are straightforward, while the last one puts the comments by users with lots of Likes and Boosts in other threads at the top.
