Real names… not so important on Olympics blogs, but our editors take it very seriously on community news sites. To them, comments are a huge step backwards and jeopardize the news org’s credibility. They want the checks and balances that they have with letters to the editor. They want control and accountability (halmarks of newspaper editors everywhere). My position is that if we can offer it up, great, but I’m not breaking my back to build a system that requires real IDs. The good news for our editors is that our users actually like to use Facebook Connect to comment, so they get their precious real ID as a side effect.

I think @howardowens has a real ID system in place at batavia.com but it’s mostly a manual system that relies on him checking new registrations. Good for him, but the system doesn’t scale.

Agreed about the odd thumbs up button. I think they wanted it to post your action to your Facebook news feed, rather than provide yet another useless social widget that brings them no traffic.

Why is “real name” important? I certainly understand why anonymity is not preferred (it’s not conducive to civility), but forcing someone to use their “real name”? To talk about Olympics uniforms?

And thanks for that tidbit about commenting v thumbs-up. It occurred to me last night that I’d only tried to use the thumbs-up feature, not actually comment. That’s because if anything was going to have a low-barrier of identification, I thought it would be the “anonymous” vote. What a screwed up system!

First, OpenID is too hard. It needs to get better or be replaced. This week’s “facebook login” craziness at Read Write Web showed us just how much work is left do to on our technologies if everyday users are going to adopt them.

Second, at the moment Facebook is currently the only login method where you can be reasonably assured that members are using their real names. It is the closest thing to true identity on the ‘net. Journalists – especially the crusty curmudgeons who hate comments on their stories – love this about Facebook.

Third, a huge portion of our audience is already on Facebook. There are too many barriers to getting people to sign up for a new account and Facebook makes it push-button simple for the vast majority of site members. On my sites, Facebook Connect is the #1 account type because anything else requires more work for the user. What’s more, Facebook offers a fairly full suite of community tools that help bring content back to Facebook users. News sites, typically not the biggest spenders, see this as an easy way to tap into a massive user base, rather than build one from scratch. It’s difficult to turn down. (example: Huffington Post)

I have heard from some folks that they don’t like, don’t trust, and won’t use Facebook Connect on our sites – so it’s a good thing that we offer a variety of ID systems. So long as I can offer a variety of options, I will, but Facebook’s size and strength (even in some of our smallest markets), make it more and more difficult to avoid using the rest of their suite.

BTW, the NBC site let me comment without Facebook Connect but the thumbs up button did require it.