Today Facebook revamped the commenting plugin and I've decided to give it a whirl.

I was forced to delete my existing seven (!) comments to make way for the new system, but I'm keen to jump in and see what it's all about. Who knows, maybe we'll look at adding more social plugins to Mighty Ape in the future.

Ignoring some minor visual tweaks, the plugin only took a few minutes to implement.

Benefits for readers:

• Assuming you're signed into Facebook (and who isn't?) you can now comment without entering your name, email address or fumbling your way through a captcha;
• Comments made by your friends will float to the top of the commenting section;
• Your comment now appears on your Facebook wall (you can opt-out of this) to encourage your friends to engage; and
• Replies to your comments placed on blogs will also appear on your Facebook wall.

Benefits for publishers:

• Comments are now linked to real people. No more anonymous trolls (sadly, one of my seven comments fell into this category) or comment spam;
• Increased traffic to your blog via wall posts on Facebook; and
• Replies to comments on Facebook walls will also be mirrored on your blog. This is gold, as your blog benefits from activity on Facebook.

I think Facebook commenting is a big win for bloggers and will result in more comments, more traffic and more readers. The only negative is that your commenting data sits on Facebook and readers who don't have a Facebook account can't submit a comment. I understand both of these issues will be addressed in a future update.

UPDATE: if Facebook is blocked at your workplace you may run into problems commenting on blogs. This may actually be a fairly significant problem for many people.