The official coComment weblog

coComment provides a large variety of RSS feeds: conversations, comments, tag filtering, groups, blog, ……
It is quite difficult to display all those feeds on the conversation pages without confusing users: to make it simple, we have created a dedicated page were you can find all your feeds and get the URL you need: http://www.cocomment.com/rssPromote

coComment enable private conversations: in this case, only you and member of a private group can see the comments. To enforce the security, you have two sets of RSS feeds: public and private feeds. The public feeds will not display any private content. You can share public feeds with anyone, but we recommend that you keep the private feeds links for your eyes only

We have just released a range of exciting new features to ensure that coComment works everywhere !

We can now integrate your account with Twitter and FriendFeed: sigup in coComment and all your comments are automatically sent to your Twitter and FriendFeed profiles. To enable this, go to your account page and follow the instructions.

Our coCobar (the toolbar that is displayed bellow the commenting area when using our extension or on integrated blogs) has been fully redesigned:

• New look
• Notification area: never miss any updated conversations

Whenever you receive a notification in the coCobar, just click on the message and a small popup will display the relevant information.

Wordpress sidebar plugin: on Wordpress blogs, just install this plugin and drag and drop to add coComment integration or any of our sidebar widgets (your last comments, last comment on your blog, top users, top tags). Sigup and use our integration wizard to get the instructions.

Our bookmarklet now supports Google chrome. If you are a Chrome user, just click on the bookmarklet to enable coComment before commenting. Unfortunately, it is not possible to write an extension for Chrome, but we are following this new browser development and will write an extension as soon as this feature is available.

We also improved the tracking support for Youtube: track your conversations on Youtube and never miss a comment !

We have just released a new version with lots of new features and improvements:

• Improved performance: Significant increase in speed while browsing. Reduced time of server access via coComment extension and new caching mechanism for JavaScript loading.
• New Home Page: Visual and easy to understand presentation of coComment features.
• Improved conversation pages: Improved layout of “my conversations” page, including direct links to blogs/sites and default link from extension to “my conversations”.
• Outsourced conversations: New wizards for using coComment to power conversations on your blog/site, including seamless integration with Blogger with just few clicks.
• New version of coComment extension: Enhanced sidebar functionality, with ability for easy and simple browsing of conversations within the sidebar. This feature is available for Firefox only, but the IE version is coming soon.
• Version 2.4 includes many more improvements in addition to the ones above, so please come and check it out!

Your feedback is welcome, please send us your opinions and tells us what you like, what you’d like to see next, and anything else you’d like to share about V2.4!

Thanks
The coComment Team

coComment V2 Beta is now live! Please check it out. This is a major update of the service, including many new features, which we’ve been told makes coComment the most sophisticated conversation tracking tool out on the market.

In this process of transition to V2 Beta, we are working very hard to correct any unexpected bugs and provide you with as little interruption as possible. As this is the biggest upgrade to the product we’ve had thus far, we would appreciate your help with identifying and informing us of any issues or inconsistencies you may notice with the new version. Though we did as much pre-launch testing as possible, there may be some glitches that occur now that the new version is in production. We promise to do everything possible to fix the bugs immediately. PLEASE SEND ALL QUESTIONS AND COMMENTS TO: info@cocomment.com

If you’re looking for inspiration is checking out the new features we suggest to try the following:
1. MY COCOMMENT (Your personal page with overview of your conversations, your community and what’s hot in the conversational space)
2. MY CONVERSATIONS (Updates on your conversations and the ones from your friends, groups, favorites plus invitations sent by your buddies to join interesting conversation)
3. MY COMMUNITY (Your friends, groups, favorites, followers and conversational neighbors)
4. MY GROUPS (Starting point to share conversations by interest, only with selected people (private) or extend interactions for your audience)
5. SIDEBAR (Navigate efficiently from any one conversation to another)
6. COMMENT ANYWHERE (Start a conversation on any webpage, comment on and share with your community interesting information anywhere on the web)

Thanks for your support! We’re very excited to bring you these major improvements and upgrades!

The coComment Team

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.

A couple of weeks back, I was having a chat with Max, one of our new developers. We were discussing improvements that could be made to the “My Conversations” page, and the conversation drifted towards RSS feeds (well, feeds in general). I started thinking about how feeds could be made more useful for conversations (because, frankly, I don’t know about you, but I have a lot of trouble following conversations through feeds). I’d like to share some of my thoughts with you, and you can let me know what yours are.

• When they are blog posts, feed items are reasonably independent from one-another. You can read a single feed item and it makes sense on its own.
• When the elements of a feed are parts of a conversation, however, that changes. Whether the conversation is a comment stream on a blog post or the replies to a forum topic, the different elements in it are closely linked, and it’s difficult to understand one of them without seeing it really in context. Context here is two things: the initial article, forum topic, or even web page which sparked the conversation; the other comments which led the conversation to that point, or at least a number of the comments immediately preceding it in the conversation.

Now, if you keep that in mind, you’ll understand that feeds are pretty adequate for following:

• a series of loosely joined articles (blog posts)
• a single conversation

They are not the ideal solution for following multiple conversations simultaneously.

However, the very reason one would want to subscribe to conversation, usually, is because there is more than one to follow. (If you’re just having one conversation, or read only one blog, subscribing becomes less useful.)

So, how could we organise comment/conversation feeds to make them more usable?

The main problem I have with multiple conversation feeds is that the conversations are all mixed up. Unless I check the feed very frequently and have all the ongoing conversations present in my mind, and they’re not too busy, the main function of the feed will be to let me know which conversations have been updated, and give me a handy link to go and check them out on the original webpage.

I think a conversation feed should do more than that. Here’s how I, as a user, would like to see the conversations I’m following.

• First, make the conversation the feed element, instead of the comment. I know this sounds bad, because we expect a feed element to be atomic, and a conversation is clearly not atomic — a comment or conversation element is. But from the reader’s point of view, the unit of meaning here is the conversation. As I said above, a comment alone usually has little value.
• Second, provide context. If there are two new comments in a conversation I’m following, give me those two, plus 2-3 older ones to help me remember where I left off. Give me the title of the blog/forum and the post/topic name. And give me a link to the original publication page if I want to read everything.

Obviously, this can’t be done with a traditional RSS/atom implementation. You need something somewhere to count the new comments, distribute them into their respective conversations, and package it all neatly. This is where I see a service like coComment step in.

Do you think that presenting conversation feeds in this way would make them more useful for you? What other ideas would you have?

I’d like to stress that this is just my personal thinking. We’re not planning to replace the current coComment feeds by this system (and if that were to happen, we’d leave the “traditional” ones in too, I’m certain).

So. How would you like to read your conversation feeds?