The primary goal of WhereinDE.com is to crowdsource answers to local questions and to archive those responses for future reference. And since this website started, doing that has been a constant challenge. For example, someone asks a question at WhereinDE.com and the question is posted to our Facebook page and to Twitter, but if an answer is posted as a comment on Facebook, or as a reply on Twitter, that’s it; the answer never makes it back to WhereinDE.com (unless I manually copy/paste it).

For a little while, WhereinDE.com was using a service called Twitoaster to pull in comments from Twitter, but that service was killed in the Spring of 2011. Similarly, there have been a few services that could grab comments from Facebook, but every time Facebook changed (which you know happens regularly), those services would fail.

Introducing Livefyre

Livefyre is a real-time commenting system. That means comments (and replies) posted directly into Livefyre on WhereinDE.com will display immediately – without the need to refresh the page. To post a comment, Livefyre authenticates users using Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, or Open ID. 

To integrate WhereinDE.com with the local-social web, Livefyre will gather the responses posted as comments on the Where in Delaware Facebook page and will pull in replies to @WhereinDE on Twitter with a feature Livefyre calls SocialSync.

Got answers? Post and share!

When posting an answer via Livefyre, you can easily post a link to your response on Facebook and/or Twitter. To do this, simply, check the boxes next to the “Post Comment As” button.

Like someone else’s answer? You can share that, too. Hover over the time stamp on the comment and a share button will appear. Click it and a new window will open to share the comment on Twitter, Facebook, or as a link for email.

Needless to say, I’m excited about Livefyre and what it can do for WhereinDE.com. Hopefully it’ll work flawlessly (and stay free) for a while!

- Phil Woods (creator/moderator/the guy that fixes the broken stuff)