The official coComment weblog

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 !

Today we’re excited to launch coComment 3.0, a major new version that makes it easier, faster, and more fun for you to track conversations on any site or blog. We’re also teaming up with retaggr.com to extend and enhance coComment user profiles.

Being the the first and largest comment tracking and powering engine, coComment continues its commitment to serve the needs of our users and enhance the coComment experience. It is also the first and most popular comment tracking service that allows users to track conversations across any site, independent of coComment’s integration with the site – from blogs and newspapers to social networks. We’re now tracking over 22 million conversations from more than 280,000 sites , with more being added every day!

We look forward to getting your feedback on coComment v3.0, which makes it even easier for you to do what you enjoy most – share opinions, debate ideas, and monitor conversation across the web. Highlights of the new coComment version include:

A new and improved design! We wanted to make it easier for users to discover conversations, find new commenters and what’s hot in online conversations. The new design prominently features rankings in popular categories including groups, sites, tags, and more.

Simple Integration! We made the comment powering and integration process much faster and easier to use. We want the process to be as hassle free and robust as possible.

Navigation and Tools! We simplified the navigation to make key features easily available such as My coComment where all your conversations are and Discover to find new conversations and coCommenters.

We also updated the sidebar is a tool that allows users to comment and navigate around the conversations on sites at the same time.

We also have a new partnership with an exciting company called Retaggr.

Retaggr offers coComment users the ability to create a single, always-updated, interactive business card linked to their coComment conversations and their activity on a wide range of social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, and other popular services.

We encourage you to check out coComment v3.0 and please keep the feedback and ideas coming! The coComment Team

Although this new release of Firefox is a major step forward in term of features and performance, it does not come without issues. We were, we confess, more than a little surprised to find that it was not backwards compatible. We’ve been monitoring the development over the last months and hoping that this would be fixed BUT, as we all now know, that did not happen and the final release is not fully backward compatible with Firefox 2.

There are two areas we are working on right now:

- Support for our extension: FF3 introduces a new security mechanism for extensions. We have adapted our code to support this and we will release a FF3 compatible extension very soon.

- Javascript issues: Our service, like many others, makes extensive usage of browser side Javascript. FF3 introduced new rules enforcement as well as major modifications in some basic APIs (like JSON). We are currently working on adapting our code whilst still keeping it compatible with other browsers. We will keep you informed on the progress of this task.

This means that, right now, you will almost certainly experience compatibility issues with coComment if used with Firefox Version 3. We would therefore recommend that you DO NOT UPGRADE yet.

If you absolutely need to use Firefox 3 then you can still use the coComment bookmarklet bookmarklet to capture your comments.

Please stay tuned for more news.

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’d like to announce today the launch of coComment Japan - a fully localized version of the coComment Service for the Japanese market. We noticed early on that a number of users of the main (english language) site were from Japan, and that — coupled with a fact we read in the Economist about Japan being the largest blogging market in the world by daily blog posts — was a big incentive to get a localized Japan version going.

Over the past few months, we’ve been working with our Japanese partners, Netage Inc. (a Japanese internet incubator - part owner of the highly successful social networking service Mixi.jp) to localize the service. After lots of hard work, they launched coComment Japan at jp.cocomment.com today!

• coComment Japan will be part of Netage’s ecosystem of services, which includes;
  • Trend Match (Adsense-like content matching ad network)
  • Saaf bookmark (social bookmarking)
  • Saaf headline (social news)
  • TAGGY (Tag based search engine)
• coComment Japan supports Netage’s identfication service “SaafID”
  (based on OpenID). All of the above services and coComment Japan will be
  accessible through single sign on.
• coComment Japan will support many platforms including most Japanese Blog
  services, such as:
  • Yahoo! Japan Blog
  • livedoor Blog
  • goo Blog
  • cocolog (Nifty)
  • excite exblog
  • Hatena dialy
  • Rakuten blog
  • Ameba blog (CyberAgent)
  • Saaf

  And it will also cover the various platforms already supported by coComment.com.

We’re confident Japan will be a big market for us, and we’d all like to send a big thanks to the Netage team for their great job!

The new coComment is here, and it brings a LOT of improvements to the existing service. We will detail each feature in future posts, but here is an overview of what’s new:

• THE COCOCRAWLER
  The coCoCrawler has arrived, and will keep an eye on your conversations for you. Remember when coComment would inform you of new comments only when they were made by other users of the system? It’s over now, the most requested feature is up and running (it actually has been running in hidden mode for a month) so don’t be surprised to find many new comments in your conversations.

• TRACK THIS CONVERSATION
  Another heavily requested feature: you can now track conversations even if you don’t participate! Simply check the appropriate box after coComment has been activated. The conversation will appear in your page and be followed by our crawler.

• META CONVERSATION
  Want to comment on a web page that has no built-in comment functionality? Now you can activate coComment on any webpage, and create a comment which will trackable in your conversations on the coComment service. If anyone else comments on that page, you’ll be able to monitor the conversation - as you would on a comment enabled website. Now you can start conversations everywhere!

• NEW INTERFACE, SITE STRUCTURE AND NAVIGATION
  With help of the great usability specialists Namahn, we have reorganized and simplified the site. A new homepage will facilitate login and registration, a new navigation allows easy access to your conversations, community, and tools.

• TRY THE SERVICE WITHOUT REGISTERING
  If you want to give coComment a spin without signing up, a temporary cookie will be set on your browser - without you having to give any information.

• FILTERING OF CONVERSATIONS
  Filter your conversations by type. See what you said on blogs, on media sites, in forums, choose how your conversations will be displayed.

• AND TONS OF OTHER FEATURES
  Five languages available (English, French, German, Italian and Spanish), more capture-compatible platforms (most notably YouTube!), add people or sites as favorites, send coComment invitations, customize your page (try to drag and drop the boxes on the right of the screen!), and much more!

A lot of new things for you We hope you enjoy the new coComment, happy conversations folks! We’re glad to see our top commenter already likes the new features!