There’s no denying the fact that the internet revolves around social. It is only going to get more tightly integrated when things like Facebook’s “Frictionless Sharing” becomes more widespread. So as a website owner, how do I utilize all of this social power for my own evil deeds? Sure, I’ve got social buttons so it’s super easy to +1 and “Like” all of my content, but that so 2010. The latest craze has been to bring the social networks to your website by generating conversations around your content instead of people simply leaving comments.

This is where LiveFyre come into play. At the core, they are a hosted comment service. The magic lies in how it’s tightly integrated with Facebook and Twitter (hopefully Google+ in the future). You can @ mention all of your Twitter and Facebook contacts to bring them into the conversation here on my website. You can share good comments on Facebook and Twitter. To top it all off, it will bring posts from Facebook and Twitter into your page where it belongs using what they call SocialSync.

It isn’t perfect yet. For example, I have a site that is half custom built and half WordPress. So on their end, they consider this two separate websites and is treated like two separate installs. So I have two places to maintain settings and moderate comments. They say this is getting worked on. The other problem I have is with SocialSync. While it’s great that it’s snatching all the posts from Facebook and Twitter and bringing them into my website, it’s just there for reference. You cannot interact with those posts and tweets at all. You can’t “Like”, or reply to those conversations. You can’t even follow a link back to Facebook to enter into the conversation there. This is a new feature and they are iterating their product quickly so I suspect I won’t have to wait long.