We have received countless emails about Facebook testing comment replies via email for the past few months however this afternoon it became official. It’s somewhat surprising that it has taken this long for the company to get this up and running but I’d assume there were some significant technical limitations. It’s a relatively basic feature, however effectively parsing through millions of emails can prove complex.

While Facebook hasn’t rolled out commenting on other features, the company could use the lessons learned from rolling out comment replies and apply them elsewhere. For example users could quickly reply to messages sent via email. For those users with smartphones like the iPhone and Blackberry, replying to messages has never been an issue. For those users with less advanced phones, it can be cumbersome to log in every time they receive an update about a message or a comment.

If you want to take advantage of this new functionality you’ll need to make sure you have email notifications for comments configured properly. You can do that via the Account Settings page. My guess is that most frequent readers of this blog have smart phones which means this new functionality won’t be a needed addition. If you want to learn more, check out Tom Whitnah’s blog post.