Facebook literally spells out “Comment” to get users to do it — like they do on FriendFeed

Sometime within the past few days, Facebook quietly changed the layout of its commenting functionality on Mini-Feed items. Previously, there was a little speech bubble with a plus sign in it which on click brought up the comment box. Now, on all feed items the word “Comment” is clearly written out.

The reason? Based on personal observation I’d say that few people have been using the functionality. It has been live for 3 weeks and I haven’t seen more than a few comments on all my items put together in that time. All the ones I did see were on pictures — which the service allowed you to do perviously.

The plus sign speech bubble looked a lot nicer than seeing the word comment over and over again, but this layout should make more sense to users. After all, it’s the same thing that FriendFeed does on its items, and it’s pretty clear that this entire comment functionality is a copy of FriendFeed.

Commenting has also been built into Facebook’s new native iPhone app. But oddly, that app utilizes the same plus sign speech bubble that Facebook just eliminated on the site. Comments do look great on the iPhone app though — in fact, they look exactly like the chat bubbles in Apple’s own Text application. And the whole app itself is kind of like Twitter.

Facebook may not have much originality, but it does implement features well. Hopefully the word “comment” gets the conversation going.