Your blog post comments are being stolen!

Really?

As many of you have seen, a couple days ago I implemented a way to post inline replies or lets call them what they are, comments; on the front page of Planet Lotus. The comments appear right under the blog post itself and any registered member of the forum can make them. This is a half ass effort of mimicking the functionality of Facebook and not an attempt to steal the conversation way from blog posts. Half assed in that a pure ripoff would be ideal; it's the single best thing, in my opinion, about Facebook, and why I loath twitter.

So, is it stealing the conversation away from the blog post? It certainly could be seen as that, but couldn't you also group the posts that get sent to http://twitter.com/planetlotus or the Planet Lotus Facebook group in the same way? Go take a look, people have made comments to those posts, but i don't think those comments are the same as the comments made on the blog post itself. I think the commenter fully understands that it's not a message to the poster but rather to those deciding weather to read the post. The same could be said for Twitter. The comments or replies made to a post are about the topic in general, the poster, etc. This is the same way I hope the replies on PL are used. A way to comment on the post as it relates to being listed on PL.

If PL has jumped the shark, maybe this is a way to go back in time, to that dreaded day; and tell Fonzie to stay home. You could use this as a way to make a comment without it showing up on the actual persons' blog post, just a message to other potential readers pondering the click. Think about it, take a hyperbolic title, you could call someone out on it. How about the 18th post saying 8.5.1 is available for download?

In the end, the user will decide. Just like in many other areas of the site, it could die a slow death. It looks like this is the case since I'm the only one using it .