You can now add video to Facebook comments or a video can simply be the comment. This feature is now available to Facebook users worldwide. According to Facebook, “You can upload them as replies to posts by people and pages, as well as within groups and events. It’s supported on desktop web, iOS, and Android. To try it out, click the camera icon next to the comment field!”
Baldwin also announced it via video from the new Facebook Seattle offices. We tried to embed it in the article, but it appears that the embed function for videos in comments is buggy. (Update – Bob Baldwin replied to our comment about this saying, “As I said in a different comment, we’re rolling out over the next few days. Thanks!”)
Bob Baldwin, a product engineer at Facebook, said:
At Facebook’s 50th Hackathon early this year, we prototyped the ability to upload a video into comments and replies on posts, because we wanted enable more engaging and immersive conversations. This adds to the suite of multimedia features within comments including: links, photos, stickers, emoji, and starting this week video.
At the hackathon, we coded as quickly as we could all day, and by the evening we could feel the pieces starting to come together. A little past midnight, we had the feature mostly working on both desktop and mobile apps. And when we demoed our hack to fellow employees the following week, they absolutely loved it! Over the past few months, we continued to refine and stabilize it, as a side project we all were eager to ship.
This was no small feat to add support across interfaces and within two heavy traffic services, like comments and videos. That’d be a challenge in a month, let alone a single day. We were fortunate to have enough shared interest from the ideal engineers to get the it done.
