The official coComment weblog

coComment is at DEMOfall 07 this week. Today, Tuesday, we got our chance at our six minutes of fame in front of nearly 800 people. I’ll leave it to the subsequent blogs and posts to see how we did but, I have to say, we enjoyed it and we certainly seemed to get a lot of attention on our stand afterwards.

Our entrance

Presenting

Matt speaking

For those who would like to inflict the full presentation on themselves it’s accessible on the DEMO website at the following location DEMOfall 07 Presentations (You will need to select coComment to view)

Matt

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.

We have had, as I am sure everyone can imagine, a large postbag of items from users with comments and feedback about coComment Version 2.0 Beta.

As a result, we are at the moment undertaking a redesign to make the user interface slicker and easier to use. We are not, having learnt our lessons from the Beta launch, going to go for one huge new release but will, instead, be releasing new versions frequently (weekly, maybe sometimes slightly more) in the next few weeks each with small updates and iterations.

We think that the speed and bug issues are now resolved. However, that does not mean that there will never be any issues … as we have to interact with unknown websites across the internet it may be that you find a site where coComment does not work properly. If you do, please please please let us know … we will fix it but if we don’t know we can’t.

As ever, feel free to contact us at any time.

Best,

Matt.

Firstly, an apology. The upgrade of coComment to Version 2.0 Beta has been difficult and I know that, as users, you have been inconvenienced. We are sorry and promise not to do it to you again.

As well as the usual teething troubles and unexpected bugs, we experienced a database corruption which made coComment increasingly slow and unresponsive to requests. We believe that we do now have the major bugs ironed out and that the service should be faster and more reliable than before the upgrade. However, if your experience differs please do let us know and we will resolve it for you.

We have also had a lot of feedback on the design and its usability. We have, in response to many comments, reverted conversation display to the old ‘accordion’ style within the MyConversations framework and the client to the previous version. The ‘new’ client, which appears on websites to allow you to control coComment, is now only activated when you use the Sidebar viewing mechanism. We will give you the option as to which client to use, with the default setting being the less ‘intrusive’ version.

This is still a beta product … the final version will be released September 24th … and we are always completely open to feedback on usability/functionality/design/look and feel. Please let us have your comments/concerns and we will respond.

Once again, our apologies for the difficulties. We believe very strongly in the future of the comment space and coComment 2.0 is intended to take the state of the art a long way forward. In trying to do so much, in one step, we created problems for you and ourselves. We will not, in future, shy away from developing the product to move it forward BUT we won’t try and do quite so much in one go !

Please feel free to email us personally with your feedback/comments and thank you for your patience and understanding.

Best regards,

Matt (CEO) – matt@cocomment.com
Nicolas (CSO) – nicolas@cocomment.com
Christophe (CTO) – christophe@cocomment.com
Kristina (VP Marketing) – kristina@cocomment.com

As some of you may have noticed, when we transitioned to coComment V2 Beta, we encountered some technical issues, not too uncommon for major product updates like this one. In an effort to eliminate as many issues as possible, we did a private beta test program first. However, as this is a major new update, it was impossible to test all possible combinations prior to launch. We could have waited longer to release V2 Beta, but we felt that our users would benefit more from getting a significanlty improved product sooner rather than later.

With that, we are working very hard to solve any of the existing issues and make the service as error-free as possible. As some of the potential bugs may have not been detected yet, and we WANT to hear about any problems, comments, issues that you may be experiencing. This is precisely why we released a Beta version of the product. Please feel free to send you feedback to info@cocomment.com and we WILL respond promptly to resolve them.

Thank you for your understanding!
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

Quick update on v2: We are completing the migration to v2 Beta and we expect to have the new version up live on August 2nd, this Thursday. We’re very excited to show you v2 Beta, so come and check it out later this week!!!

In the meantime, bear with us as we’re trying to eliminate any potential glitches associated with the transition. Please don’t hesitate to contact us with any questions or suggestions. Thanks and looking forward to Thursday! coComment Team

It’s been a busy week for coComment, migrating to v2 and attending more exciting industry events in SF! Last Monday we were at the Geek Dinner, hosted by Loic Le Meur & Hugh MacLeod. It was fun meeting more bloggers and commenters, not to mention the swanky venue. Now Loic has lived up to the likes of Posh and Becks, having his own US welcome event, sans Tom & Katie

Then last night we were at the Bloggers Connect conference. It was great to see the faces of many bloggers writing about real estate. It made us aware just how many different topics our users write about. And we had a chance to learn a few things about buying condos, mortgage rates, etc.

And last, as you know, our development team is working 24/7 on the migration to v2, so look forward to the new site very soon!

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

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.