Das hat mich daran erinnert, dass ich schon lange mal coComment ausprobieren wollte. Jetzt habe ich’s getan, und auch gleich die beiden Wordpress Plugins coComment Enhancer und Show coComments installiert. Dadurch taucht unter dem Kommentarfeld e…

1. I want an easy way of being notified if someone contributes to a conversation I have contributed to as well.

2. Since my participation in online conversations are part of my online identity, I want to have them at my disposal. So I want to list, or at least link to, all the comments I posted throughout the web on my personal pages, such as my blog.

That’s all I want; nothing more, nothing less.

I started using three services in parallel, to see which one would serve my needs best: CoComment (the current version; 1), co.mments and del.icio.us (tagging every discussion I participated in with the same tag).

del.icio.us -

del.icio.us is a bookmarking service and not specifically purposed for tracking conversations, but I’m already using it and using their browser plugin it’s a very straightforward approach. The biggest problem is that it doesn’t enable me to extract or link to individual comments. All it can do for me is track conversations in a central location (by bookmarking these conversations), and I can export them by RSS. Not a perfect solution, but at least it’s simple and uncluttered.

co.mments -

co.mments is not that bad either. It’s fairly simple and transparent as well, and just as with del.icio.us the tracked conversations are exported over RSS. It also offers some means of getting notified of new contributions to the conversation, by adding a new RSS item linking to the conversation that has been contributed to. Two problems though:

- It’s not clear when these updates take place. It doesn’t happen with every new contribution, and for some conversations it doesn’t happen at all. Why? Shoot me.
- It clutters up the RSS feed. Since new items are added that link to the same conversation, no longer I have a clean feed of all my conversations at my disposal.

Just as del.icio.us, since it only provides links to tracked conversations, it doesn’t enable me to get a feed of my own contributions.

CoComment -

To be honest, CoComment annoyed me the most of all. It’s a very cluttered service which offers a zillion features, all very ’social’ and ‘web 2.0′, but I don’t give a damn as long as I cannot do what I want to do. I was hoping it would enable me to track my own contributions, and not only the conversations I participated in. Unfortunately, the service doesn’t succeed in that. At least not for me. All right, I can track conversations just as with the other services, but in a very (as compared to the former services) complicated way. You have to remember to enable the CoComment bookmarklet before you add your comment — if you forget you’re fucked. Then a bar is added to the comment field, which doesn’t make sense to me. A checkbox labeled “Linked to my nickname”, what on earth does that mean?? And what does “Blacklist as tawm” (tawm is my username) mean?? The RSS feeds are no less confusing:

- Why can I only get a feed of ALL comments, and not a feed with just MY comments?
- All contributers that are not members of CoComment are named ‘unknown’ though, while at least a name would be useful.
- For some conversations new comments don’t show up in my feed. Don’t know why. They do show up in my ‘conversations’ page on their website.

Really, the idea is nice, but with these problems it’s simply not good enough and thus not useful. Then today I read this post on TechCrunch about CoComment version 2. So I’m hoping to find some solutions to the problems I encountered with the service. Turns out the entire focus in the release is on even more groups-, friends-, exploration-, community- ‘yadda yadda whatever’-features. They even offer a sidebar now. Gosh, I couldn’t care less.

My apologies if this sounded a bit unfriendly, but I just don’t get it. Why all these zillion social features before it does one thing really well? I hope I’m completely wrong and all the problems I encountered are due to my own stupidity (in which case you need to improve your usability, because that means I’m the average user ;)).

Conclusion: I think i’ll ditch the two services specialized on comments and just go with del.icio.us. It does only half of what I need, but at least it does this in a simple and intuitive fashion.

If anyone can recommend me another service, that DOES serve my needs completely, let me know!

All the best

Cheers,
Aidan
http://www.MappingTheWeb.com

I wish there was an easy way to export my comments to a simple bookmark file. The “comment” can be the note part of my bookmark. This way, I can save my comments to my Google Bookmark or Delicious account.