Facebook Adds Subscribe Button to Comments Box

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Facebook is extending its Subscribe functionality to the Comments Box plugin popular among website and blog owners, in an effort to increase subscribers and improve the plugin’s user experience for readers.

Facebook introduced its “Subscribe” feature earlier this year, which entails following updates from another Facebook user without necessarily being his or her friend. The subscribe functionality also works with the social network’s new “ticker” feature, that provides a quick view of updates being shared by friends and persons that users have subscribed to.

Now, Facebook is extending this functionality outside of the Facebook.com site itself. Facebook’s Comments Box plugin now has a “subscribe” link beside user profile names, which makes it easy to follow updates from other users without having to leave the website.

Comments Box is a plugin launched by Facebook in March this year, and which is now installed on about 300,000 sites. With the new Subscribe feature, Inside Facebook‘s Josh Constine says the social network wants to incentivize good commenting practices, as authors of interesting and engaging comments are more likely to get subscriptions from the website’s readers.

The new Subscribe button also supersedes the previous “boost” functionality, which lets website owners prioritize certain comments, but had the problem of being used as a means to drown out dissenting or unwanted comments.

The Subscribe link will only appear if a user allows other Facebook users to follow one’s updates through Subscription, though, and this includes status updates, life updates, and other Facebook activities.