By Drew Johnson
EMS1 Editor
Starting today, you’ll notice a big change to our member comment sections on EMS1.com. We’ve implemented Facebook Comments with the goal of making it easier to comment on articles, as well as giving visibility into who’s doing the commenting.
With the new system, you’ll be able to comment on all of our content using your Facebook account, as well as Yahoo, AOL and Hotmail. And there’s the advantage of not having to log into EMS1 each time you want to comment on an article – if you’re logged into Facebook, you’re logged into Facebook Comments.
You’ll also have the option to have your comment post to Facebook, but that’s not required. Whenever you leave a comment on an EMS1 article, you’ll see a checkbox asking if you’d like to also post that comment to Facebook. Leave it checked (it is by default), and your comment will be posted on your Facebook Wall and in your friends’ News Feeds.
Unfortunately, this does mean that old comments on our site will disappear. As an online editor, I get a kick out of seeing readers interact with our great articles and with each other, and though we’ll be losing some of those great past discussions, we’re launching Facebook Comments with the goal of enabling many more new ones.
The bottom line is that the discussion that happens on our Facebook fan page is much more robust than the one that happens on our site. My hope is that by implementing the Facebook commenting system we will merge the two.
The decision to replace our old site comments with this new system is not one we came to lightly. But after surveying and discussing the growing importance of social media to EMS with you, our members, we’ve decided that there are considerable advantages to the new system that will ultimately result in a more active and vibrant commenter community on EMS1.
So look for the changeover sometime today or tomorrow, and feel free to email me or comment below with your thoughts.