CoComment is a popular browser tool for tracking conversations in the comments sections of blogs. It catches the comments you’ve made around the web and comments made after yours. It was initially launched in February. Late last night West Coast time, the Geneva based service made a major upgrade, largely in response to user requests. The improvements were much needed.
Most important is that CoComment will now track all comments made after yours - not just comments made by other CoComment users. That was a deal breaker in the past - now the service has made itself truly relevant. Competing service Co.mments has had this feature for some time. New player in the space Commentful does the same thing but appears to offer a simpler feature set for more casual use (30 item tracking limit, blinking notification of every new comment).
Another new feature is called “track this conversation” - enabling you to track comments on blog posts that you haven’t commented on yourself. Still another very cool new feature is the MetaConversation option, which lets you create a comment space tied to a page but off-site in order to leave comments about a page that doesn’t support commenting. Users can now also filter their displays by site type, so you can see just what conversations you’ve joined in blogs, news sites or forums. A number of new sites are supported; the company highlights YouTube as now included in sites you can track conversations on.
All of these point towards CoComment now being a serious player on the web. I know that a lot of people have sworn by it for some time, but until it added the ability to track non-member comments it was hard for me to take seriously. Also, the last time I used the system’s Firefox extension it broke much of my browser’s javascript. That does not appear to be happening this time around, but if important things stop working in your browser and you don’t know why - the first thing I’d do is get rid of CoComment. Hopefully this will no longer be an issue.
Presuming some key problems have been solved, I’m impressed with where this stands.
Simple and solves a problem. Isn’t that what 2.0 is all about? Looks like a real winner and I look forward to using it.
Good stuff. I used cocomment.com for a while then switched to commentful.com since cocomment couldn’t track replies to your comments unless other cocomment users responded (their user base is too small for this to happen for many blogs).
This might make me switch back though.
I too got turned off by CoComment’s only updating of other cocommenter’s comments. I’m glad to see this update.
I wonder if CoComment can expand into telecom areas, especially television. Like the pop-up videos, or MTV’s comments that ran under some videos, wouldn’t it be neat if viewers had the ability to ‘talk’ together during shows about that show.
It would be a feature you turn on or off, to see the comments in the lower part or even on the right side of your screen, scrolling by? http://www.telecommer.com
coComment will be one of the key player in Internet 2.0. A real addictif feature now!
I made a french review of those news cocomments features : http://www.2803.com/2006/07/20.....de-sortir/
“broke much of your browser’s javascript?” WTF?
Ron, I mean that many javascript links in FF stopped working when I last used the CC FF extension, then worked fine when I removed extension.
Thanks for updating the world on this, Marshall. I’ve been practically obsessed with coComment for the past several months because of the tremendous potential it has. For active commenters like me, a tool like this is a world-changer.
I’m impressed so far. It’s useful and intuitive. I’ll give it a go.
I guess I will give a second look at coComment. I used it for a while when it launched and after experiencing repeated technical glitches switched to co.mments which has run smoothly.
I will look at the upgrade in the coming days.
Serge
Biz:
http://www.njconcierges.com
Blog:
http://www.sergetheconcierge.com
I’ve had my share of issues with coComment but this latest upgrade gets them back in my favourite tool list.
see what I think of CoComment
At last!
It’s nice to see cocomment catching on. We actually created Commentful.com out of the idea that this whole “comment notification” needs to get simpler and easier. If anyone wants a simpler solution, check out Commentful.com - we also have a bunch of new features in the works. Nevertheless, I have always like Cocomment and it is nice to see them move in this direction, it was inevitable.
This is really nice - I am definately going to use it, as a matter of fact I am using it right now.
It only records the comments after you post which seems odd. For completeness I would prefer a full record of the comments from the post. But it is better than it was
@ Sam
It does record the comments made before you post - you just can’t see them until you post a comment of your own, which makes sense to me.
Are you sure about that? I just commented on:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006...../#comments
and I only get 2 comments on coComment when there are far more on the blog in reality. Only Marshall’s and my own show up. Is there some delay?
*sigh*
I exchanged notes with the good folk at coComm just before the release; I related how I actually missed it, having uninstalled my extension from sheer frustration. (I know of two others, co.comment and commentful … FWIW my money’s on coComm.) With reasonable optimism I visited the site and tooled up.
But … but, even with the “Linked to my nickname” coComm widget displaying below, and with the “Track this Conversation” popup on screen, I /really/ don’t trust that my comment here will end up in the list there.
And anyhow, all I want is to be able to link back here by way of my comment. Displaying all the comments is sweet, but it should be an option.
It’s as though their feature cup runneth over … seems to call for some severe refactoring.
For this conversation I can see all the comments made previous to mine inside the my conversations page on cocomments - I have tested with other pages and it works correctly there too.
1) Clicking the bookmarklet is required, even if this site is well integrated
2) my previous comment registered. so the transport works
2) the coComm site displays this thread, comments before and after, even though I did /not/ click “Track this conversation” … so there doesn’t seem to be a parsimony option. (Or I didn’t find it.)
Long/short: I really think coComm is onto something.
The new features fail short in my opinion. I did not see the MetaConversation option, which might be interesting for blogs like Dave Winer’s that does not have comments.
Lloyd, the part that says “start a conversation about this page” is the Meta part, check it out, pretty cool.
Marhsall, Lloyd I just tested the meta part on Dave’s blog as suggested and it works (click the bookmarklet once there). Feel free to test it.
In addition to this, Lloyd, don’t hesitate to tell us how we can improve coComment. Our objective is to build a great service and help our users with the right features. We are also here to learn; so don’t hesitate to tell us if you have ideas how to make the service more answering your needs.
Wow very useful indeed.
I think it’s good to be a responsible ‘commenter’ when you are a blogger. And this tool is great at helping you become just that.
The most useful I’m not seeing mentioned anywhere is the ability to stop tacking a comment/conversation. I had the misfortune of replying to the “test” thread on cocomment when I first signed up as a user. Since then, I’ve been inundated with random, sometimes vulgar, replies to the thread. Thankfully, this has been remedied in the new release. I think this, in addition to the other changes already mentioned, makes this service usable now.
I had the same errors you talk about Marshall. I talked with one of the techs there and apparently it was because I was working at the time on a blog platform that did not support cocomments. Not sure if this new version works with that platform as I am not a blogger there anymore, but I have to say I really am impressed with this new version so far.
Hope it’s working for you.
I remember to push the coComment bookmarklet about half the time. It really needs a Firefox GreaseMonkey script.
My biggest complain, though, is that it sent me my password in plaintext, unsolicited, in their “new features” email. Luckily, I opened the email in private, but what if I opened it up with a friend peeking over my shoulder? tsk, tsk
The new firefox extension is a piece of shit… read more at my blog:
http://www.anotherblogger.com/.....ate-sucks/ and http://www.anotherblogger.com/.....hittiness/
Martin: what’s wrong with the Firefox extension coComment provides?
Still not good.
Agreed, they have introduced an impresy, jazzy layout, a new meta-conversation feature, but it is still not good.
Why? Because, a user has to be SIGNED UP to have his comment included in the conversation. Only those users with coComment profiles can see a conversation. For instance there are 27 comment as I write this and coComment shows me only 22; those 22 who have coComment profiles. That’s restricts the conversation a mighty lot and kills off a large part of the conversation on many sites, for example with niche blogs.
This was the very reason that made me move from coComment to co.mments And I think, I’ll stick with co.mments for the time being.
Regards,
Shri.
PS: No, I don’t want anymore extensions. I already have too many, thank you.
Joshi, I’m sure you made a mistake. Indeed, you must wait the crawler to catch and see the 5 miss comments! The 22 people you see don’t all have a cocomment profile, but the crawler certainly grab the name of the guy who post a comment. Test this with a trackback and you will see that’s not possible to have a cocomment profile for a trackback but you will see it in the conversation;)
Shrikant, you’re mistaken. It’s not necessary to be a coComment user to have your comments appear in the coComment conversations. What henri says is correct.
a) if the blog is coCo-friendly (ie, “integrated” — see http://www.cocomment.com/tools/integrate) comments are directly sent to coComment, whether the person posting is a member or not
b) if the blog is not integrated, then you must wait for the crawler, but the comment does get collected, though a little later, maybe.
Totally aside from that, I saw you were from Pune — do you know I lived there for a year? I didn’t know about blogs back then, but kept a journal of my adventures: http://climbtothestars.org/logbook
Henri, Steph:
My apologies to both of you. I guess, I was too hasty in my statements.
The fact is, i found the entire coComment interface a little clumsy when it first came out. And about the same time co.mments was launched. Though tacky, co.mments would immediately list all the comments on any webpage, irrespective of whether there was a feed to it or not (parsing HTML somehow?)
And that was exactly what I wanted. So I grew into co.mments. Well, now I guess there is a level playing field. Let’s give both of ‘em a spin!!
Steph: (On a side note)
I know that
“The new firefox extension is a piece of shit””
As I wrote previously, I missed coComm after having ripped the extension out by the roots. So this time, averse as all get out, I just installed the bookmarklet.
Colour me happy.
Shrikant, you’re wellcome!
ya
it is good
i am not a blogger but I use it to find out which are the most commented topics and sites. A great source of info (especially since the latest update) !
i would love to see a feature that showed me a list of all the URLS of commentors. For example, show me a list of web sites that people have indicated as their website when posting to techcrunch!
I’ve been guerilla commenting on pages with this ;0 I have FP on a number of major sites ;0
ventureblogalist: nice idea! I’ll add it to the idea box we have
Must say that I still prefer co.mments. It’s just quicker and easier to use. It’s good thought that CoComments now notices posts from non-users - before, the service was useless.
I see it as a slightly more feature-rich, but hard-to-use alternative to co.mments.
I love what cocomment does for me.
It helps me find my replies a lot easier. I am sure more surprises for us from cocomment.
So far I’m liking CoComment, but co.mments is also very nice. It is to bad co.mments only has a bookmarklet.
Since i cant visit wordpress.com in mainland China, I test my first coComment Here
i’ve been a big fan of cocomments from the first day i started using it. the thing that probably most impresses me is the responsiveness of the cocomment team to feedback. while this new version is huge, they’ve been adding and fixing features continuously.
i must concur with the confusion that having so many features and options available can cause. i like the suggestion of giving the user some control over not only what options are used but, more importantly, the interface that is displayed for me when i go to cocomment.
Been using CoComment for the past month and just came across a way to expose a loophole in Friendster with it. You can technically view Friendster sent messages with CoComment. Here’s how:
http://praveenrajan.com/blog/2.....mment.html
As I just wrote on Praveen’s blog, the problem with Friendster is now fixed. New private messages are safe from being captured as comments and we have removed the “conversation”.
Test