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What we've learned from the changes to Facebook's comments

You may have already noticed or read that Facebook changed the way you post comments on threads on their site. Basically, they took away the submit button, meaning that when you hit return, it posts your comment. This doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me in that it seems that Facebook is trying to limit conversation, rather than encouraging it.

Whatever the rationale, a few friends of mine and I had a big thread of experimentation and found that:
  • You can include carriage returns by hitting Shive+Enter
  • You can now tag friends in comments using the @ symbol and typing the name. That wasn't an option before
  • You can now edit comments by clicking on the x, but only for a brief time after you've posted the comment, apparently. If you click the x immediately after leaving the comment, the comment box goes back to edit mode, but I waited ten seconds and clicking the x only gave me the option to delete.
It also seems pretty buggy, so it's surprising that it's been rolled out now. It'll be interesting to see if these features stick around or will mysteriously disappear like so many other features on Facebook (like the subscribe function, which I miss), and if it sticks around, will we ever figure out why Facebook's thinking behind this is?

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