After announcing sweeping changes to the way it plans to shape its terms of service going forward, Facebook is today making another big move towards transparency: opening up its official corporate blog to comments. And, users are having a field day with it so far, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s post from yesterday about the company’s new “governing principles” attracting more than 1,000 comments.
Facebook says that “they won’t be responding to comments directly” on the blog, but it appears someone is at least monitoring it, as some of the more profane comments I saw earlier today seem to have been removed (see below). Nonetheless, there are hundreds of candid messages, both addressing the current Facebook turmoil over the ToS and additional features and changes that users would like to see.
The move to open up its blog to comments puts Facebook’s in rarified air amongst other top Internet companies. Google’s dozens of blogs have comments turned off, as does Digg (though you can of course comment on the stories once they get Dugg). Twitter used to have comments turned on, but appears to have disabled the option. Yahoo actually leaves comments turned on, with yesterday’s post from new CEO Carol Bartz attracting nearly 100 of them.
I think Facebook is smart to open up in this way. While comments are likely to be negative a lot of the time, especially when it concerns issues like privacy and community management, it also gives the company an opportunity to see smaller issues that might be bugging people, like numerous users who have suggested things along the lines of, “on people’s status boxes, there should be a “don’t like” and “don’t care option.”
Of course, the overriding goal of opening up blog comments in addition to yesterday’s announcements are to convince users that Facebook listens and responds to users’ concerns, which, will largely remain unclear until the company is once again tested on privacy issues.
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