The comments in the Facebook and Google+ discussions about my posts are mirrored back on jefftk.com. I started doing this because I wanted people reading posts via my site, some of who refuse to use Facebook, to be able to read the comments, but I also like that it can thread comments and integrate discussions happening in different places.

As Google continues running more javascript, however, these comments have been showing up in searches for people's names and they've have been suprised to see their words appear outside of Facebook. I've always been happy to remove people's comments from this mirroring or switch them to first names if they ask, but following some metadiscussion on yesterday's post it sounds like many people had refrained from commenting because they didn't want their full names linked to posts. I've now switched all comments here to first name only. This does lose a little clarity when two Bens are going back and forth [1], but if more people feel comfortable commenting I think it's worth it.

(This is retroactive; existing comments are also just first names. I'm also still happy to make custom changes for people, like skipping your posts entirely, using initials, or using a nickname.)

[1] One fix would be to dynamically add last initials if needed for disambiguation. This is a little tricky, as it requires a pass over all the names before you can choose how to display each, but I could do that if things become too confusing.