CoComment upgrades, now worth using

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.