Facebook is making some changes (I would say improvements but that’s depends for who) to its interface. The first change designated to make commenting and “Liking” easier and more accessible on the site’s mobile platform and the second change is designated to fight with spam links (well, and maybe also with Google).
One Click Comment Or Like
As first noted by TechCrunch’s unofficial Facebook writer Josh Constine, in order to ease the process of leaving a comment or marking “Like” for Facebook’s giant mobile community (432 million monthly active users according to its amended S-1 form) the social network is discarding the bit clumsy “+” button which opened the Like and Comment Buttons.
This button has been replaced by a one-click Like / Comment bar below the posts (as in the image below) to encourage users to be more engaging with the mobile social network platform contents. As Josh is saying: “it’s already getting me to Like more posts.”
Although supposedly it is just a little almost unnoticed change, it will probably increase meaningfully the number of “Likes” and comments by Facebook mobile community. Sometimes all it takes is just a small interface change to make a big usage difference.
CAPTCHAing Blogger Links
In another effort to increase the user engagement (but from a different angle) by reducing the amount of spam links spammers are posting on the social network, Facebook has added a CAPTCHA security check for every post that includes Blogger sites links (interesting remainder: Google owns Blogger).
Emil Protalinski from ZDNet has began noticing that every link from a Blogger hosted site he posted, immediately received Facebook’s spam royal treatment, the CAPTCHA test. That includes ANY site hosted on Blogger whether it is a standalone domain (domain.com) or a Blogger domain (domain.blogspot.com).
The reason for this severe action against all Blogger sites is probably due to extensive spamming from these websites. Until now, only certain links that specifically raised a spam flag have required the user to enter the CAPTCHA text to verify he or she is indeed a human posting and not an automatic spam bot.
I don’t really know what are the link spam rates from Blogger hosted sites, but requiring a human verification test from all of them seems like an excessive move… There are A LOT of legitimate Blogger sites (all the different Google product blogs for instance) that doesn’t deserve this treatment every time they are trying to post something.
I will try to investigate this issue furthermore and update if I’ll find something.
Update: It looks like Facebook opted out the CAPTCHA security check from all Blogger hosted sites. I have examined a few links from reputable Blogger sites and no CAPTCHA has popped. Facebook didn’t comment on the subject.