Facebook adds to the chatter with Mini-Feed comments

Facebook will soon be making it possible for members to leave comments on each others' "mini-feeds" of activity, according to an announcement Wednesday from the social network. The development is slated to go live later on Wednesday. In other words, it's a very meta turn. Facebook members will now be able to comment on the announcement of a posted item in addition to the posted item itself.

Currently, Facebook allows members to comment on one another's "walls," as well as on individual photos, posted items, videos, and other pieces of media that they share on their profiles. The Mini-Feed, introduced in 2006 to initial shock and eventual acceptance, is a feature on Facebook profiles that details a given member's activity on the site--photos added, profile information updated, status message changed, new friends, et cetera.

Facebook also added external information to Mini-Feeds earlier this year, with users opting to sync their Facebook profiles with accounts from Yelp, YouTube, Digg, Hulu, and a number of other media sites.

"We aim to help users share information and communicate more easily, which sometimes entails having a conversation around a piece of content or an action," a release from Facebook explained. "We already have comments for photos, videos, and posted items, but we realized there is much more content users want to comment on for example, status messages." The new feature will be marked with a comment bubble.

So if a friend of yours, let's call him Josh, changed your status message to "Josh is really hung over from all that tequila," you could navigate to Josh's Mini-Feed and leave a comment saying, "Me, too, but for me it was bootleg gin."

If members don't want friends commenting on their Mini-Feed items, they can turn the feature off in their privacy controls.

[slimpunk]

How long before users will be able to rate the comments on the status messages? haha

"Bob's comment on Josh's Mini-Feed - 67% thumbs up, "33% thumbs down."

[adamloving]

I like this feature a lot. Anything that initiates communication is a good thing.