The official coComment weblog

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!

We just released version 0.4c of coComment.

Firefox extension

The most important part of this release certainly is the official release of our firefox extension. Have a look at it at save yourself the trouble to press the bookmarklet all the time. As an added feature, the firefox extension also provides an automatic notification whenever a new comment is made to one of your conversations.

We also did some bug fixes for better support of MovableType and Wordpress and added support for Journalspace, CommunityServer, Kulando and Clagnut.

Last but not least, we added a feature that allows blog integrators to track all comments, even from users that are not using coComment (we already added this to this blog).

New development team

At the same time we have to inform you that the current development team is replaced with a new one. As of now, Dominik ‘hilti’ Hiltbrunner, Jean-Claude ‘JC’ Brantschen, Roger ‘jegi’ Jegerlehner and me, Peter ‘Merlin’ Balsiger, will not be a part of coComment any more.

Good-Bye and have fun.

With the deployment of version 0.4 we made some changes to our internal code structure of the bookmarklet. Although we tried to ensure that the interface to the outside world, e.g. the greasemonkey script from ecmanaut, stays the same, we seem to have made some critical changes nonetheless.

Fortunately, ecmanaut already updated his greasemonkey script to make sure it also runs with the new version of the bookmarklet code. Thus, all users using the script are now advised to update their script to make it work smoothly again.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

We just deployed version 0.4 (aka ‘Jegi’s Work’) of cocomment.

The new version bring many small bug fixes, but we also have two interesting new features.

First there is now a privacy feature. In your account page you can now hide yourself, or better your virtual identity from others. You can remove yourself from top user list or recent cloud or you can hide ‘Your conversations’ completely from others. Or just disable the blog box or the RSS feed.

The other important new feature allows to ‘pimp your blog’ even more. You now have a small box showing the top (co)users on your blog and a box with the top (co)tags. Both of these boxes can be added to your blog just as the current blog box.

 

We also added an RSS feed to the current blog box that is configured just as the blog box is. This now allows you to tailor the RSS feed to your own desires.
At the same time we also made some slight adjustments to how the blog box is displayed. Although we tried to ensure that it still looks as similar as before, it might now look a bit different, depending on your adjustments. We are sorry about any inconvenience this might make. If you have problems, please use the forum.

Another small thing to note, we changed the RSS and the blog box to now link to the original posts and blogs instead of linking back to coComment. We think this is more logical and fairer than the previous solution. I hope this matches with your opinion.

Now, no more talk, have fun with coComment and its new features. As always, if you find any bugs (very unlikely… ), let us know.