The official coComment weblog

Last Friday coComment was the Tech Crunch 9 party at August Capitol on Sand Hill Road. Thank you to all that stopped by and took a look at coComment v2.0 Beta. The party was attended by 900 people and had amazing energy!

We met great people and gave a peak into the upcoming v2.0 Beta, to be released next Tuesday. In the meantime, you can get to see the new version at http://beta.cocomment.com although you’ll need to enter Username: betatester and Password: cocommentv2 for access to the test environment.

You can also check out some of the photos and videos from the Tech Crunch 9 party.

Will be live on Tuesday, 2nd August.

We were planning to go live this Friday but a last-minute glitch, don’t you just hate them, meant we had to postpone until Tuesday.

Since we’re so close to the live date, for those interested, you can get to see the new version at http://beta.cocomment.com although you’ll need to enter Username: betatester and Password: cocommentv2 to access the test environment.

Cheers,

Matt.

Got an opinion about everything? Blessed with the gift of gab? Then coComment wants you!

coComment is searching for the ultimate conversationalist to be a commentator for coComment 2.0 set to launch this summer.

There are 5 ways to become a finalist and win prizes so start your conversation now!

Follow the link: http://www.brickfish.com/Lifestyles/coComment?=cocomment details on how to enter.

Spark some dialogue or add to the conversation and you can be 1 of 5 finalists. A one week clash of the conversationalists
will determine who takes the top spot.

To learn more about the competition, simply copy and paste this url to your web browser:
http://www.brickfish.com/Lifestyles/coComment

————————————————————-

So if you think that you are a “true conversationalist”, this is your opportunity to share with others, speak your mind, get valuable feedback and why not, make new friends!

It only takes a couple of minutes to check it out!

coComment has spent the last couple of months very busily hiring.

We thought that now was a good time to start introducing them to you so here, first, are the most important group; the Development Team. They are working on coComment 2.0 at the moment which we’ll be launching in Q3.

The team are (left to right and back to front); Tetyana, Maxim, Alexander, Victor, Mikhail, Yuriy, Marina, Oleg (Development Manager), Sergey, Igor.

Please don’t hesitate to get in touch with your comments, ideas and suggestions.

Cheers,

Matt.

We’re at Innovate Europe this week telling everyone about coComment.

Have met several sites that have now decided to integrate with coComment so expect to see a very rapid rise in the number of conversations available to you on coComment.

We’re also delighted to welcome SevenLoad to coComment … great video content and some very funny conversations too Sevenload Conversations.

Finally, please drop us a line and tell us how you like the new discover and search facilities. Are they what you want to help you find people, sites and conversations ? What else do you want ?

Cheers,

Matt.

It’s always a tough decision as to whether to tell people you’re launching a new version of your product or to, instead, wait until it’s finished and unveil it with a flourish.

We’ve opted for the former for one simple reason; we want feedback and input into what we’re doing. Nicolas Dengler and I (Matt Colebourne) presented some of the mockups, ideas and concepts at the re:publica conference in Berlin. We got a good reaction to the overall concept but also some great ideas on the execution that will impact the product that we deliver.

If you’re an active coComment user please do let us know how you think the product should be developed and taken forward. We will also be offering a beta test programme to some users (you need to volunteer) to get early feedback on various aspects.

So, please do get in touch. Tell us what you like, what you don’t like and what you’d like to see in the near future.

Also, come and visit us at Next07 in Hamburg this week and Innovate Europe in Zaragoza. We’ll be there in our distinctive new T-Shirts !

Cheers,

Matt.

The coComment team have been at re:publica (re:publica) in Berlin this week.

What a great conference; lots of really thought provoking presentations, some highly entertaining ones and a lot of fun too.

We were here to, amongst other things, get some feedback on the coComment 2.0 Concept. Many thanks (und freundliche Grüsse) to everyone who attended our workshop and many thanks for the feedback. As mentioned during that session, we will be providing a beta test environment as we move closer to actually deploying coComment 2.0 and we are inviting people to volunteer as beta testers. Just a quick note on this one though, we are only going to be able to support a limited number of testers since otherwise we’ll overload our test environment.

I was also introduced to the wonders of PowerPoint Karaoke (Zentrale Intelligenz Agentur). This is one of the best, and funniest, things I’ve ever encountered. The concept is simple; randomly downloaded powerpoints on topics such as “Say ‘Yes’ to Dorsten” and, my selection, “History of European Bread Culture” are picked and you have to present to them in front of an audience and a judging panel in the style of Pop Idol/X Factor. As I was the only English speaking participant the judges were very kind to me. I haven’t laughed so loud in ages and the winner, Jan Schmidt, wowed us all with details of the oversize women’s show market on ebay ! Trust me, you had to be there.

And I won third prize ! I think it was favouritism towards the sole englishman but I am now the proud posessor of a comprehensive how-to guide to the internet. It will, I’m sure, fill in the many holes in my technical understanding of html/xml/php etc - once I learn enough German to actually read it.

So, once again, a big thank you to the organisers for having us and freundliche Grüsse to everyone at re:publica - particularly for your understanding of those of us with less than fluent German skills. It always embarasses me that, at an event in Germany, I can stand up and speak in English and be understood - I very much doubt that the converse would be possible in the UK.

Matt.

Wanted to keep you up to date on progress regarding this issue.

First, the good news, we have discovered no ‘massive hole’ in Citibank’s site. We have now spoken with Citibank and, it appears, what happened is that three users, almost certainly accidentally, sent the contents of a text input field to coComment and we then stored it. As coComment allows users to aggregate all comments on a site these three comments then appeared as a ‘conversation’ on a secure citibank site.

In reality, these were three completely unrelated inputs and the many tens of thousands of comments entered were not being tracked by us. No financial, password or username data was compromised nor was there the risk that this would happen.

The coComment extension can work in automatic mode to make the collection of comments simpler but this is deactivated for secure (https) sites. coComment will not automatically track conversations on any https secured site. So, you don’t have to worry that coComment will collect conversations in secure areas automatically and without your knowledge.

We have now blocked the Citibank site from any comment collection and Citibank will be providing us with a detailed list of all their sites so that we can block any collection from them whatever the user does.

We have posted in a couple of places about the advisability, or otherwise, of using simple text input for even slightly sensitive data. Given the number of extension and client tools now available for the user, it seems to us that alternative site strategies (secure java client input for example) would offer users much better security. We ended up with slightly sensitive data in our database simply because we didn’t actively block Citibank’s site. It does concern us what someone actively criminal might therefore be able to achieve.

As ever, would appreciate your comments/feedback/suggestions as to what we could do better.

Best regards,

Matt

We were alerted to a potential risk over the weekend thanks to the diligence of two users. Many thanks to Tom Biro (Click Here)
and John Ratcliffe-Lee (Click Here).

Although, as was pointed out, this shouldn’t happen and site security policy should prevent it we would just like to remind users that we do provide privacy solutions to protect you.

We allow you to Blacklist any site to prevent coComment storing any comments you enter there. We also offer you the option to recommend the site for inclusion in the global blacklist. No comments for any site on the global blacklist will be stored by coComment for any user.

The functionality looks like this:

Select Blacklist (highlighted in the screen grab) and the Blacklist dialogue window opens. You can then Blacklist that site for yourself and/or also recommend that the site be blacklisted for all users.

As ever, would be delighted to get your feedback on any improvement you think we could make here.

Happy, and safe, commenting.

The coComment Team

As the leading repository of all the great, good, bizarre, disgusting, wild, extreme, funny and downright strange comments that you all make we thought that the following suggestion we recently received made a log of sense …

“You guys have got loads of comments and conversations going on … but which are the great ones … the ones I really want to know about but don’t now ? I use coComment as a functionality tool but I also really want to use it to find interesting content. How about I and a bunch of others let you know if something is really good and you then highlight it ?” – AnnaNonymous

Well, we thought this was a great idea BUT we thought it was kind of hard to decide what categories to suggest. After all, a simple … “Best of this month’s Comments” is kind of hard to pick and probably not particularly interesting.

The other thing that occurred to us is that we’re not necessarily the best people to be picking the winners anyway. So, we’re looking for nominations for ‘celebrity’ bloggers and commenters to judge and for what the categories should be.

We came up with the following, probably rather lame, suggestion list:

The Britney coCoNut – For the strangest and most bizarre comment/blog of the month

The Bush coCoNut – For the stupidest and most insane comment on a serious political issue (or blog – yes, whoever you are, we saw your comment on Hilary’s site)

The Blair coCoNut – For the most egregious attempted manipulation of the media for your own ends

The Osborne coCoNut – For the maddest comment

The Douglas Adams coCoNut – For the most gratuitous use of the word ‘Fuck’ in a serious conversation or blog (sorry, couldn’t help it ….)

So, are these lame or what ? Let us know your suggestions for the categories and the judges (you can nominate yourself) and we’ll get this running at once.

Cheers,

coCo Team