The official coComment weblog

As you already know, we will soon have tagging available. We are also working on others features that will help everybody to better manage / share / track conversations. We are also discussing the possibility to add an anti-spam check for comments. We believe that these features are interesting for blogs readers / commenters and especially for blog owners.

In this context, we would like to help blog owners to integrate coComment into their own blog. We have defined are procedure for standard blogs but would like to ease this process by using plugins whenever it could be possible. I must confess that for the moment we had no time to investigate too much this topic. We have recieved a Wordpress plugin from David. Here is what David says on the last version:

Yet another update to the coComment Enhancer Wordpress plugin: the addition is a toggle switch, displayed next to the submit button of the comment form. The switch allows to enable or disable coComment tracking, or login to the coComment service. It actually does the same thing as the coComment bookmarklet does - it’s just positioned where you need it.

Download coComment Enhancer v0.9

You can also view it in action here.

Which other blogging platform or forum system could we build plugin for?
Do you have links / experience / code that could help us to provide you with new plugins?

Thanks!

Maybe you’ve seen that Merlin, our service development wizard, was not here these days. No worry, he’ll be back in a few days.

To let you know, we have new guys with us in the coComment team. Let’s welcome Leif, Chris, Roberto, Guillaume and François!
We’re all preparing you great stuff for the coming weeks, as mentionned in the previous post.

After less than 2 weeks of operating as a closed Beta, the coComment service is now fully open! First of all, thanks to the entire coComment user community - your positive feedback has been overwhelming, and your active collaboration with the development team in helping us improve the service has been fantastic.

What we’ve been working on

As we’ve communicated before, the past couple of weeks were intended to be a very “soft” launch to test the service stability and scalability, and to get some initial feedback from the closed user group. Specifically, over the past 2 weeks, we have:

• Stabilized the core service and considerably improved scalability
• Responded to user feedback and addressed your desire to add support for a wider range of blogging platforms (we’re still working on more!)
• Improved the coComment bookmarklet and added the ability to enter your comments into your coComment account after you’ve already submitted it on the blog site. (In other words, tried to address the fact that a lot of people - including us - forget to hit the coComment button before submitting comments).

What’s next

We’re still working really hard to add new features and respond to all your feedback - and this a process we don’t ever intend to stop. Top priorities right now are:

• Both a browser extension and blog integration to eliminate altogether the need to click on the bookmarklet before submitting comments.
• Enabling you to track all of your conversations in their entirety - not just conversations with other coCommenters.
• Allowing you to tag conversations, in order that you can more efficiently find, organize, and structure your conversations.
• Enabling you to follow not only your conversations, but other conversations on topics of interest to you.
• Allowing you share conversations you’re tracking with other people.
• An anonymity function, so you will not be identifiable in any way as the source of comments you want to keep anonymous
• … and some other cool stuff we’d rather keep in “stealth mode” for now…

We’ll keep you informed of new developments, and in the meantime, we encourage more feedback and participation! Thanks for helping us make coComment a useful service for everyone!

The blogosphere is full of armchair critics spouting off opinionated rants. But until recently, ranters without blogs of their own were largely consigned to obscurity.

Not anymore. New services like coComment let internet users track, store and automatically republish comments they post on other people’s blogs.

We’re on Wired

One of the things we failed to communicate effectively is that cocomment does not (yet) crawl comments. So comments appear as follow ups in Your Conversations ONLY if they have been made using cocomment.

We are working on bringing you more but there are some issues (mostly identity related) so we will need a little bit of time here. If you have ideas on the matter you are welcome.

Stay tuned, we just hired a former search engine specialist to help us with the task.

PS: I swear I choosed the blog post for the above screenshot randomly. Promise

If you sometimes submit some really super-smart comments that you later wish you could remove because, hey, they are just too cool to be true, well now you can do that! Simply use the Delete link that will appear below any of your comments.

Could life really be easier?

It seems CoComment stepped into a new market - CommentTracking as Scoble puts it - and just like in every field, competition quickly starts!

So meet our first two competitors:

• myComments, from Diego Fernando Gonzalez. The system works with a plugin you install on your blog, then all comments are tracked with a RSS feed. myComments currently supports WordPress and TextPattern but has an API available so that people can develop their own plugins.
  
• co.mments.com from Aasaf Arkin. The idea here is to turn conversations into RSS feeds. Compatible with WordPress, MovableType, Blogger, Flickr and Digg, co.mments.com has already been deemed by a number of users as a good complement to CoComment. Why? CoComment has the cool community featuress co.mments lacks (blog box, user identification, all your conversation in one place), but co.mments does something we need to work on: the possibility to track conversations regardless of if people use our system or not (we call it comment crawling).
  We will contact all these guys, maybe setup an industry meeting and see what we could do together.

We are working on fixing the homepage problem (reported by Paul and imsickofmaps - cool name dude) and more generally on optimizing the CSS.
If you have some display issues now is the time to let us know (or remain silent for ever ).

Everybody: we have four people reinforcing the team next week, more servers coming (have we said that already? Five times? OK I stop then), and now the issue is about prioritizing what has to be done.

We got tons of ideas, critics, suggestions and requests for the past four days. We put everything on a big white board and will now discuss what we will do first. We think you should have your say on this, so speak up!

Should we try to make cocomment compatible with more platforms? Reinforce the existing service? Launch the search engine? Improve the bookmarklet? Remove the invitation codes? Build moderation or an authority system?

Comments are below, we’re listening!

At least it’s what the alexa traffic stats seem to say. Are we really the 5938th most visited site on the web in three days?

We definitely need more servers