Facebook announces video and photo previews within comments

By Mike Flacy July 21, 2011

Facebook-browsing — Image used with permission by copyright holder

When a user posts a link into a Facebook comment, the link auto-populates with a photo and description. Identical to sharing a link on a wall, the new commenting functionality allows Web users to preview content before clicking on a URL. The comment also loads video data in the Facebook video player for a preview. It’s unclear how widespread the new commenting functionality is being implemented. As of this post, the new functionality isn’t working on Facebook for the majority of users.

Page owners will be able to take advantage of this upgrade in the form of advertising content within the comments on supporting or rival pages. For instance, a movie reviewer could post a new, media-rich comment of a Captain America review on an official post created by Paramount on the main Captain America page. Facebook has yet to identify the amount of control that page owners will have over these new comments. It’s also possible that this new system will be abused by spammers in an attempt to advertise phishing scams.

Disgruntled Facebook users took the announcement as an opportunity to complain about the recently revamped chat system on the announcement page. Since the launch of Skype for video chat, users are disappointed with the modification to chat’s placement and user interface. The new chat box is placed to the right of the screen for those with widescreen monitors. The most common complaint from users is the amount of offline friends that populate the chat interface, inherently deceptive for users.

Facebook is also dealing with angry users on the iOS platform. Users have been assaulting the official Facebook app with one star reviews after recent updates have caused crashes and failed to deliver private messages. Facebook’s lack of development on the iPhone application as well as the lack of an official iPad app has been odd to say the least. The original developer of Facebook for iPhone, Joe Hewitt, left Facebook in May 2011 to purse HTML5 projects. When developing the application, he repeatedly voiced displeasure over Apple’s approval process.

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