Competition
February 16th, 2006
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.
RSS feed
February 16th, 2006 at 13:25
Yes, compete, compete. But better together…
CoComments should be working together also with the most important blogging platforms (Blogger, WordPress, MovableType…). I just wonder what could happen if Blogger.com launched a (universal) comments tracking system.
We users will decide.
February 16th, 2006 at 21:42
The other thing is if these competitors have an openapi, is there anything stopping you getting the comments from commentors that don’t use Cocomments?
TIA
Molly
February 16th, 2006 at 23:10
once I touched with coco, I can live without it, and there’s no time for me to think about other comment tracking service since I have to retain may top 3 rank on coco.
February 16th, 2006 at 23:27
I suposse the Team has already considered this simple idea to viraly extend the CoComment service on the blogosphere: We the users could just add a short text to all our comments in order to inform that the comment has been tracked by CoComment. (As I do at the end of this comment).
That short text could even be an optional setting on the CoComment pop-up window (bookmarklet). I wonder if it’s possible.
(This comment has been tracked by me using CoComment)
February 16th, 2006 at 23:33
Adding a text to the comment you post should be no problem at all. We didn’t want to do it, because we thought that a lot of people might not like it and think it’s some kind of spam or something.
But as an option, this could be cool
February 16th, 2006 at 23:44
Maybe “a lot of people” might not like it, but also “a lot of people” would discover CoComment by this simple method (curiousity). And I’m sure they would love it as I’m doing.
(This comment has ALSO
been tracked by me using CoComment)
February 17th, 2006 at 00:25
@Ignazio: This is something that the community should decide to do, and not coco itself. That being said, coco could release a tagging system similar to technorati or del.icio.us that we could embed in our comments for better tracking, and more importantly for consistency (if every Tom, Dick, and Jane comes up with their own implementations of comment tagging, this defeats the whole purpose). But then the blog developers would need to implement a pinging mechanism to let coco know about the new content. Coco faces a unique technical hurdle in that with other social blog systems, activity is implemented and is limited to just that blog, whereas comments span multiple blogs/users/etc; if you think about it it’s actually a pretty daunting task. I look forward to seeing what they come up with :-).
February 17th, 2006 at 15:31
Yeah, the one thing co.mment has over you right now is they can track all comments and not just other cocomments. If you could solve that then it’d be awesome!
I definately like the idea of tagging as tracked by CoComments.
(This comment is now being watched by coComment)
February 20th, 2006 at 17:46
coComment API would be cool… or just options for the RSS feeds (also, make them public, if not already [haven’t checked recently]) to generate many different syndicies.
February 26th, 2006 at 22:04
The one by Arkin was deployed a few days following coComment’s launch.
February 28th, 2006 at 09:57
My favorite thing out of MashupCamp is the word Scrapi. Think of every blog has having a scrapping API, and just go and grab the content.