The official coComment weblog

coComment service will be unavailable today from 9am GMT to 12am GMT for a maintenance.
We will do our best to reduce the maintenance time and get the service up and running as soon as possible.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

coComment started, as a company, in January 2007. coComment, the concept, is significantly older having first seen the light of day as a proof of concept demo at the Lift 06 conference.

In that time, we have transformed what was a concept into a company with a very different (and much larger) product set, built a team of 22 people and acquired over 1.15million users.

However, in all that time, we’ve not made a cent/penny/grivna in revenues nor have we sought to do so. The funding from coComment has come solely from its investors.

For us, 2008 is a critical year. It is the time when we need to go from ‘promising startup’ to ‘viable business’ and a key part of that is starting to generate revenues. We want to do so in a manner that does not alienate our users nor distract them from what they want to do with coComment.

We have therefore started running advertising on the site, in our feeds to others sites and in coComment windows. I know, of course, that most people would prefer to see advertising-free services but the reality is, of course, that ultimately we cannot provide the service to you without generating revenues.

I also want us to offer our users the opportunity to have an ad-free service for an annual fee of $5.

I’ve seen some comments on other blogs … but not many. I therefore wanted to raise the issue here so that everyone has an opportunity to respond and let us know what they think. We’re all in favour of conversations so we’re happy to start one about this and get your views.

Best regards,

Matt.

We will start now an upgrade of the service database. Although we are making all what is possible to keep the service up, you might experience some slow down or disruption in the next 2 hours.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Christophe

We are now taking down our service for a maintenance.

We will try to keep this operation as short as possible.

Sorry for the inconvenience

Christophe.

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 have started the migration to coComment V2.

The initial step consists of a huge update of our live database.

Although this does not affect the functionalities of the current production site running coComment V1, you might experience some slow response times from the service.

We apologize for the inconvenience, but it is worth it !

Christophe

Hi,

Some of you reported a problem where it was impossible to submit comments and getting an error alert message about cookies not being enabled.

We initially suspected some browser issue related to security but quickly found out this could not the the case.
After deeper investigation, we identified that the time on one of our servers was not correct and jammed our anti-spam system. This was reducing the time you have between entering the page and submitting the comment (and this is why it took us some time to identify the issue as when we tested the comment submitting it was always working).

So the problem is now solved and all server time is synchronized !

Thanks you to all of you who reported the issue and special thanks to prinzzess and to Brian for providing me details about the issue.

And again, sorry for the inconvenience.

Christophe

We will migrate our servers to a new network infrastructure in order to get better performance and reliability. This operation was previously planned but canceled for technical reasons.

The operation will start Wednesday 23rd at 7:00 am CET (4:00 am New York, 23:00 Los Angeles, 6:00 pm Tokyo)

The maximum estimated time for this upgrade is 4 hours, however, we will try to make this interruption as short as possible. Although we will not be receiving your comments during the shutdown, the sites integrating coComment will not be affected by additional latency as we will provide a temporary server to respond to the coComment client.

This blog will remain up and available at http://blog.cocomment.com. We will keep you informed of the progress of the operation.

This is the first major step in extending our platform capacity. Some hardware and software upgrade are planned for June and July.

Thanks for your understanding !

Christophe.

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.

As some of you noticed, we have had a partial outage on April 3rd. This was not a total service interruption as many users were still able to access it. However, some were not able to connect to it (like me), or did get very slow response.

We are still investigating what happened, but I guess you understand this is a strange situation as the service was still up and running and some users still using it !

In order to prevent such an outage to slow down the access to an integrated blog or to a site using the blog boxes, we are making some changes in our client code and our service architecture. We will keep you posted when the update will be available.

Christophe