Just a week after Google launched its Social Bar, Facebook has launched a social widget for Facebook Connect, called the Comments Box. Ray C. He announced the launch on the Facebook blog, saying:

“The Comments Box is a great way for any website, blog or photo gallery to add social comments to their page in just a minute with a few lines of code. We want to help bring you social widgets that make it easier for users to communicate and share across your site and with their friends on Facebook.

With the Comments Box, Facebook users on your site can comment on your content, post those comments to their profiles, and share them with their friends on Facebook. The Comments Box allows non-Facebook users to make comments on your site as well. And via our APIs, you can access related comments made on Facebook as well to bring the conversation together.”

While this is undoubtedly a cool new feature, Frederic Lardinois at ReadWriteWeb picks up on the significance behind the move:

“What is most important about this announcement, though, is that Facebook continues to open up its platform to third parties. Earlier this month, third-party developers got access to users’ status updates, notes, and links. Now, Facebook is allowing bloggers and publishers to implement some of Facebook’s core features outside of Facebook’s own site. Facebook use to be a closed off silo, but this is changing rapidly right now and it will be interesting to see how Facebook’s users will react to this.”

Eric Eldon at VentureBeat questions the need for Comments Box, saying:

“From VentureBeat’s perspective, we use Disqus, which comes with its own set of features, like threading comments, spam filtering — and Facebook Connect integration. So I’m not sure why we’d use this new widget.”

Meanwhile Jason Kincaid at TechCrunch wonders what Comments Box might mean for the future development of the social web:

“But in the end all of this content is going to be going to Facebook, which established blog owners and publishers are not going to like. It’s also bringing Facebook one step closer to becoming the universal standard for social content across the web – an idea that may alarm advocates for open standards like OpenID.”

Elsewhere on the web:
will.i.am and Kevin Spacey both made appearances at Mobile World Congress, to get the lowdown on the future for entertainment content on mobile devices. TechCrunch UK interviews MySpace’s Travis Katz.

YouTube has expanded its Annotations feature to make it more social, allowing users to invite friends to use text boxes, labels, and interactive buttons to enhance their videos.

ReadWriteWeb has an interesting look at how Japanese newspapers are innovating to try to save themselves.