VKontakte’s comments widget: half-baked again?

Only recently I wrote about the shortcomings of the wish-list service from VKontakte, the Russian social net­work, and today Pavel Durov, its founder, rolled out a new fea­ture: the comments widget.

In its cur­rent form, VKontakte’s com­ments widget is a really very simple com­ment­ing form. Out of curios­ity, I imme­di­ately installed it on all the prod­uct pages of the Alisa online store. You can take a look, for exam­ple, at this page: there’s a test com­ment there.

UPD. The form has already been removed, for the rea­sons below.

I hope that the devel­op­ers of http://vkontakte.ru will soon finish this tool, like the wish lists, because in its present form it isn’t ready for use. And here’s why:

1. There’s no way (or I didn’t find one) to notify a mod­er­a­tor about new com­ments on the site. You can hardly go through every page check­ing whether some­thing has appeared.
2. There’s no way (or I didn’t find one) to com­ment anony­mously, which seri­ously limits the form’s use. It would be enough to add the option of leav­ing a com­ment with­out log­ging in, just giving your name and email.
3. The user isn’t warned where their com­ment gets broadcast. It’s auto­mat­i­cally copied into their status and sent out to their friends’ news feeds, which not every­one may like. First, users need to be warned about this, and second, given the option to turn off the broad­cast­ing of com­ments in their settings.

On top of that, many sites already have com­ment­ing sys­tems like http://disqus.com/, and it’s not clear what to do about them. I think Disqus will sooner or later use the VKontakte API to let people log in to its system, but how long we’ll wait for that, nobody knows.

I hope the VKontakte devel­op­ers will grad­u­ally “polish” their fea­tures, but for now… we wait.