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March 18, 2006

Use Co.mments to Track Blog Conversations

Michael Arrington

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At first blush, Assaf Arkin’s Co.mments looks like a competitor to CoComment, the tool that allows you to track comments you’ve left on blogs (see CoComment reviews here).

But in reality it’s quite different. Co.mments reminds me the most of a sort of highly specialized blog bookmarking tool, focused on keeping all of the posts that you want to track (including comment discussions) in one place. You do not need to leave a comment on the post to track it with co.mment.

And the best part is that you can use it without creating an account - it will track things and keep them organized based solely on a cookie. However, if you want to create an account to use it on different computers or browsers, you can.

To track a post, you simply install a bookmarklet and hit the button to track the post and comments. This populates a page at co.mments that shows a post summary and all new comments on the post. You can also track all posts from all users on this conversations page.

RSS is available for both your personal page and for the group page.

As co.mments evolves, there are a number of features I’d like to see added. First is a way to tag posts while bookmarking them for easier search later, as well as grouping with other users’ bookmarks by tag. There also should be more social aspects in general - for example, I’d like to know if others (and who, and how many) are also tracking a post.

One unavoidable issue - you can’t hit the bookmark button unless you are on the permanent URL for a post. Just being on Techcrunch.com, for example, won’t work. A nice feature would be a drop down list of all posts that are included on a URL (which would be easy to do by looking at the RSS for a page) if you aren’t on the permanent URL page for a post.

The site is a bit raw and unstable. If it goes down, check again in a day or two. It’s worth it. Thanks Gabe for the introduction. See Robert Scoble for a bit more.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 18th, 2006 at 12:20 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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  1. Zoli's Blog

    March 18th, 2006 at 1:14 pm

  2. Software Guide » co.comments vs. coComment

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Comments

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  1. Joe Anderson

    March 18th, 2006 at 12:29 pm

    I’m stick with coComment

  2. Zoli Erdos

    March 18th, 2006 at 12:34 pm

    I was one of the early cheerleaders of coComment, simply because they were the first comment tracker soulution that helped us complete the conversation.  But co.mments is simply better, not having the dependencies coCo or myComments have.

  3. Michael Arrington

    March 18th, 2006 at 12:41 pm

    I think they are both cool, and good for slightly different things.

  4. assaf

    March 18th, 2006 at 1:17 pm

    Tags are definitely on the todo list. There will be a slew of features coming in April to help organize and find conversations.

    I’m also working on a FireFox extension that will make bookmarking easier. The drop down list is a great idea. It will make bookmarking even easier.

  5. Rogel

    March 18th, 2006 at 1:18 pm

    I’m using Co.mments for awhile now and it is really great help in keeping track of my conversations. I’m using other plugins of Asaf, the creator of Co.mments and I’m sure we are going to keep hearing about him in the future.

  6. farlane

    March 18th, 2006 at 1:44 pm

    One of the things that makes me like Flickr so much is the fact that I can drop a comment on a photo and then check back days, weeks later to find a response. For me, that turns comments into something more akin to slow conversation. A plus, IMO.

    Excellent tool - thanks for the pointer!

  7. monkeypup

    March 18th, 2006 at 3:36 pm

    Gotta say, I’ve been using both, and pick Co.mments as the winner.

    But God Darn am I getting irritated at web 2.0 apps with the dot in their name at odd places!

  8. Sam Davyson

    March 18th, 2006 at 3:40 pm

    CoComment is ruined by the fact for it to be truly useful everyone needs to be using it. And given there are rival services (i.e. this one) that do not require this it is never going to be the case that everyone is using CoComment. Hence it fails.

    Co.mments approach is better.

  9. Migs

    March 18th, 2006 at 6:33 pm

    Nice!

    But… the interface looks too similar to CoComment. Can we take it seriouly?

  10. Steven Frein

    March 18th, 2006 at 6:48 pm

    co.mments is by far a superior tool than cocomments. Used both and love co.mments. I am glad Mike got on this one. A little late though, Scoble had this weeks ago.

  11. Michael Arrington

    March 18th, 2006 at 6:58 pm

    Steven - thanks for pointing out that Scoble has written about this. I missed it, remedied it with a link.

  12. assaf

    March 18th, 2006 at 7:19 pm

    I’ve been trying to keep it low profile for a while. Publicity is good, but not if it brings down the server, and back then it wasn’t ready for a big audience.

    I didn’t want to advertise it too much, and then having to limit user registration.

    So thanks Michael for picking the story at just the right time.

  13. Chrono Cr@cker

    March 18th, 2006 at 7:42 pm

    I like coComment more and coComment has promised complete comment tracking in the future which will make it Rock Solid and cancel the need for Co.mments. Ofcourse, they can join up in a partnership-like-thing but still….

    coComment is stunning without doubt.

    @Mike: This is quite old actually.

    I wonder how they got that kinda domain. LOL!

    ~ CC

  14. Zoli Erdos

    March 18th, 2006 at 8:55 pm

    Chrono, coCo has more bells and whistles, there is only one thing it does NOT do: reliable comment tracking. You think you’re getting it, but you depend on all other commenters also using their service.

    Co.mments on the other hand got the core concept right, it just does not have the bells and whistles.

  15. Nogg3r5

    March 19th, 2006 at 2:17 am

    I’ve been using Co.mments for ages. I started usint cocomment, but it was rubbish, it never updated its self, so it was just a list of my conversations!
    Co.mments has been much more useful so far!
    Heh, im even adding this thread!

  16. Chris

    March 19th, 2006 at 11:01 am

    Cocomment may look a little nicer and be more feature-rich but as others have pointed out it is pretty worthless at doing its actual job, following comments. I used it for two days and only saw my comments and one other. What’s the point of only following other Cocomment’s comments and not everybody else’s? Also the co.mments webmaster is very open, using a wiki for feature requests and bugs (one of mine was fixed within 24 hours), and is imoplementing a new design which should make comments much easier to track on the website. Overall I give co.mments an A- and cocomment a D-. Give them each a try and I really doubt you’ll stick with cocomment.

  17. Andy

    March 19th, 2006 at 3:46 pm

    I’ve been using both for a while now, and I don’t think I’m ready to choose between them. It’s only two bookmarklets I have to click, and I like the diffrent features each one has, so I think I’ll continue using both.

  18. kato

    March 19th, 2006 at 5:29 pm

    I couldnt understand the relation of bells ,whistles and comments. Just joking.

    Though cocoment is not yet fully developed , it eill become better and that is for sure. But that does not mean we just shut ourselves to one and only one thing trying out new things might make us know about more possibilities

  19. kato

    March 19th, 2006 at 5:50 pm

    Okay i just checked co.coments and its not as great as everyone has been saying here. If it finds the blog url wrong or has some problem(according to it) then you cant change it. Thats totaly useless atleast cocoments lets you change the url and other stuff

  20. Saul Weiner

    March 19th, 2006 at 9:12 pm

    Is this a ploy to get a blog creation company to buy the technology. What’s the long term play here?

  21. assaf

    March 19th, 2006 at 10:16 pm

    It’s a service I wanted to use, to make my life easier. It didn’t exist, so I went and built it.

  22. farlane

    March 20th, 2006 at 2:49 am

    Appreciate you doing this, assaf - it’s already made my life easier.

    This (or something like it) needs to be part of a truly comprehensive web suite.

  23. Basto

    October 29th, 2006 at 12:23 pm

    I have been looking for sites like this for a long time. Thank you!

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