Longtime readers know I like to play around with different things on this little corner of the Interwebs.

About a year ago, I tried out LiveFyre – a commenting system that has more bells and whistles than the built-in native WordPress comment system.

That little blogsperiment lasted about 20 minutes before I realized that it required a commenter to establish an account with LiveFyre.

Jay doesn’t like forcing people to create accounts just to leave a comment.

Well, LiveFyre is back again — this time without the requirement to create an account (though really, you should consider it. More on that later).

It’s super simple to use. Just write your comment and click on the “Post comment as” button. You will see something like this:

You can select to log on with accounts from LiveFyre, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, or OpenID. If none of those float your boat, you can just enter your name, email and a URL — as with the old standard WordPress comments.

Advantages to creating a LiveFyre account

By creating a free LifeFyre account, you can save your comments from all LiveFyre enable blogs centrally on the LiveFyre site, “Like” others comments, share your (or others) comments across your social networks. And more. You can build a little profile on LiveFyre that other readers can see if they click on your comment avatar. Like this:

In theory, this gives readers here a chance to learn a little about you. And maybe click over to your sites and/or Facebook / Twitter accounts.

You know, growing your social sphere and all that.

But, you don’t have to create a LiveFyre account (or login through any existing account) unless you want to.

Some cool LiveFyre stuff

• Comments are loaded in real time. So you will see new comments posted as is happens. No need to refresh the page. In effect this creates a live chat system, though in reality, on most real estate blogs you won’t have people commenting simultaneously in most cases.
• Post mentions on Twitter and Facebook Pages (not Profiles) are pulled into the blog post comment section
• You can tag your Twitter and Facebook connections when leaving a comment.
• You can post to and share your comments on Facebook and Twitter.
• Comments are crawlable by search engines
• Readers can flag comments as spam or inappropriate, allowing a moderator to check the comment
• And more. Here are all the LiveFyre features.

Facebook Comments will remain

Some of you like the Facebook Comments feature that was added awhile back. That isn’t going away. You’ll find them below the LiveFyre comments.

Give it a spin please!

Try out the new commenting system and let me know what you think. Play around with the tagging (feel free to tag me if you don’t want to bother your  friends, I won’t mind.) I can’t promise it’ll stick around forever, though I do want to give it a few weeks to see how it all shakes out. So far, I’m kind of digging it.

And I have to give kudos to the LiveFyre support team. I ran into some snags importing my existing comments, probably because I’d run LiveFyre a year ago and then returned. They jumped on the problem and actually came out with an update to fix it in just a few days. They’re very responsive on Twitter (@LiveFyre) and via email. Kudo’s to them!