I’ve also taken the audio from that video and converted the SlideShares slides into a screencast, which syncing the audio to the slides:

It’s much more useful this way than just the slides were.

Photo by suburbanslice

It’s a perfect example of what I’m seeing as a growing trend, in which various “social widgets” actually replace functionality which should be built into the platform hosting the site. Bundling together the ability to use your Facebook identity with the actual management of comments themselves looks like progress but I think it’s really a step backwards.

Announced on the Facebook developer blog, the Comments Box widget is embedded into your site through javascript, and basically enables Facebook-driven commenting.

Facebook users can leave comments using their Facebook identities, and when they do will also have the option to publish those comments back to their Facebook profiles. (This is already possible using the Facebook Connect APIs, but the comment box certainly simplifies the process).

Facebook Comments Box

What happens in the process, though, is that all your comments on your blog are no longer really on your blog. Those comments are actually submitted to Facebook, who stores them for you and shows them on demand when your pages containing the comment box load.

In WordPress terms, this means you’re not able to use Akismet, or Mollom, or OpenID, or ReCaptcha, or any of the other plugins you might be using on your site to manage comments. (You also won’t be able to use the WordPress iPhone app to moderate comments, since they aren’t submitted as comments to WordPress).

It also means that someday, when you decide to migrate away from the Facebook Comments Box, there’s no simple way to get all the comments out (and it isn’t clear whether the terms of service would allow you to do so even if it were simple).

The announcement is careful to note that:

The Comments Box allows non-Facebook users to make comments on your site as well.

But that feels a bit like “we’ll still allow you to use cash, even after we install the credit card machine” – it’s giving me back something I already had as though it were a bonus. It’s as though we’re at the point where “non-Facebook users” are, like “those with JavaScript disabled,” a community we magnanimously allow to continue to use the web but don’t really design for.

Like Yahoo Updates with JS-Kit, TypePad Connect, DISQUS, and IntenseDebate (though the last of these offers a comment import/export feature), this is yet another “all ur comments are belong to us” move, in which I think the hosting site loses more than it gains.

Or am I just a crusty old first-generation blogger thinking that I need to store away comments in a database I control, and I should really be more open to having my comments streams “in the cloud”?

See also:

• Facebook Launches Commenting Widget
• Facebook Connect Adds Cut-and-Paste Comments Widget
• Facebook Comment Widget: Quick Review
• Facebook invades your blog, rest of Web with new Comment Box

Building on the momentum of all the (OpenSocial based) applications they added a few weeks back, LinkedIn is now rolling out events. In this video, Christine Wodtke demonstrates how the application leverages your social graph, showing who in your network is attending various events:

Its a great idea, and I’ve already found or created events for all my conferences coming up. (I’m tempted to create events in the past, as a way of adding conferences where I’ve presented to my LinkedIn profile. The “add an event” flow doesn’t seem to prohibit that, though I haven’t followed it all the way through yet).

I wish the recommendations (which events they suggest you might want to attend) were a bit more precise, but I guess that’s a result of relying on things like “industry” set in your profile (mine is set to “Internet” which must be hard to match on), or job title (“Next Generation Internet Strategist” is not on many event planners’ lists of target job titles), or even education (my educational background is pretty varied and not neatly tied to what I do now). I think it’d be great to allow me to configure the app to add some tags of interests – and maybe let me choose how recommended events get sorted (date, distance, relevancy, or some combination thereof).

It would also be good to have a simple way to get an event’s URL – for now I’ve been to the event’s “page” and clicking on the “Share” link, then pulling the short url out of that message. That results in a url looking like this: http://events.linkedin.com/pub/12514
Rather than one looking like this: http://www.linkedin.com/osview/canvas?_ch_page_id=1&_ch_panel_id=3&_ch_app_id=30&_applicationId=2000&appParams={%22from%22%3A%22my_events%22%2C%22go_to%22%3A%22events%2F12514%22}&_ownerId=2757022&completeUrlHash=gXn-

I assume the nasty url is a result of OpenSocial, in the sense that the hosting site needs to know which application to load and then pass info to the application – but since they are already creating url aliases, why not expose them more directly?

These suggestions aside, it’s a welcome addition which makes LinkedIn much more useful, especially to those not in job-seeking mode.

(If we’re not connected on LinkedIn and should be, here’s my profile).

The problem is that when I send brightkite a message like: @bos

It sometimes knows that is Logan Airport in Boston, and sometimes just knows that as BOS, United States, which results in updates like this:

Anyone know why this is happening? Brightkite’s fault? Fire Eagle’s fault? Neither?

Update: Should perhaps have checked first. Brightkite seems to be working on this issue, at least according to this post on GetSatisfaction. Seems like they recognize some airport shortcodes but may not always have the full name associated with it and what city/state they are in.

Since my FireEagle feed only updates with city level info, you can’t see that it is an airport.

Hopefully this will mean fewer “United States” updates in my feed over time.

Last week’s Berkman Thursday Blog Group was an update on Babbledog – Jessica, one of the folks who does QA/testing on the site, walked us through the existing features and some stuff that’s still in alpha/beta phase.

It’s an interesting site – a cross between Digg or Reddit (in that you can post new stories/topics which folks can vote up or down) but also a kind of recommendations engine which pulls in lots of back end feeds and suggests stories to you based on your expressed preferences (answers to a quiz about what you are and are not interested in) as well as your implicit preferences (what you post, read, comment on, etc).

Down the left column, to the side of the river of stories, is the current site activity – almost like a live IM chat room discussion across different threads. They’ve also got stickers, which are badges you create and wear on your profile, to show the things you’re interested in. (You can see my profile and few stickers I created).

Once you create a new post, a discussion thread gets created around it. Here’s an example where I posted about ICanHasHotDog, the new LOLDogs site from the makers of ICanHasCheezburger:

I like that threads and users have unique urls, though they are a bit obfuscated – will I ever remember that http://babbledog.com/user/6511584d0a1248938d4abd301807dcf3/ is my profile, rather than something like http://babbledog.com/user/jeckman/ ?

They also don’t yet have OpenID, so you’ll have to create another username/password combo. They do link, in the user’s profile, to other profiles (free form – you enter URLs) but they are marked rel=”nofollow” rather than with XFN notation like rel=”me”

There doesn’t seem to yet be a way to see other users who are “wearing” the same stickers as you – in other words, a kind of “groups” function which might be valuable.

We also spent some time talking about the “progress percentages” Babbledog uses, as in this screenshot:

I love the idea of people earning points over time for activity on a site – but I have to say as a former geeky honors student (now just a professional geek) I found it rather disheartening to still be at <25% complete. That’s like an F-minus. At least when LinkedIn tells you your profile is 50% complete there is a clear set of steps for how to get to 100%.

Maybe the concept is just too mixed – there is some set of tasks which add up to a 100% complete profile, then there is some running total “activity points” you earn on the site, and a rank which goes with those points.

That way I could feel ok with my 100% complete profile and a low standing in the overall activity ranking – otherwise it feels a bit like a disincentive. Who wants to log in to a site which will keep telling them they are nearly 80% incomplete?

• Joshua Porter on the Bungee Line Podcast
• Chris Brogan’s Social Media and Social Networking Starting Points
• Forrester Report from Jeremiah Owyang on Online Community Best Practices

Joshua Porter of Bokardo, has a book coming out: Design Social Applications (Voices That Matter). He was also recently interviewed by Alex Barnett and Ted Haeger for The Bungee Line podcast: Social Design with Joshua Porter. It’s a great interview, ~45 minutes, covering many of the themes covered at Bokardo: social software as modeling the real world, personal value before social value, and data driven design. I look forward to the book.

Chris Brogan also recently published Social Media and Social Networking Starting Points, a quick, concise, eBook focused on how companies can get started in the world of social media, especially with the concept of encouraging employees to blog or otherwise connect with online audiences. Key takeway: don’t obsess about “corporate blog policy” – take your corporate email / web terms or policy you already have (don’t reveal corporate or client secrets, don’t post pornography or copyrighted material, etc) and treat your employees as adults.

Finally, Jeremiah Owyang‘s first Forrester Report (Online Community Best Practices) is out and it’s a good sign of things to come. Unfortunately this one isn’t free, unless you have access to a Forrester subscription. (If you do, get the report from the Forrester site). The report doesn’t exactly break new ground – as the “best practices” in the title suggests, it synthesis and summarizes the core ideas enterprises need to hear as they think about creating online communities. As I read it, I found myself nodding vigorously, and recognizing mistakes people make that result directly from skipping some of these best practices.

My favorite part is the section on “A Taxonomy of Detractors” which lists these types:

• Legitimate complainer
• Competitor
• Engaged critic
• Flamer
• Troublemaker

And then describes ways of dealing with those detractors, ranging from “engage rationally” to “remove from community.” I like that it doesn’t oversell the fear of bad actors in a community (which can scare companies away from engaging in social media) but also doesn’t ignore it – just notes that there are clear ways of handling such problems.