CoComment is a Feature, not an app
Pete Cashmore says CoComment is the best Web 2.0 app launched this year. I haven’t used CoComment yet, but from reading their site, my feeling is that while it may be a useful service, to me, comment tracking should be a feature of an aggregator application, not an app in and of itself. Of course, I’m still waiting for the aggregator that does this (Alex King of FeedLounge dropped some hints a while back, but I haven’t followed up). Granted, comment tracking, until recently, was difficult, but it’s much easier now. Aggregators developers should be looking at comment tracking as an important feature.
Other than that, CoComment does look nifty and useful; I just don’t want yet another account to log into. It is interesting to consider the data they may be able to collect and how that may be used to track active/popular content, and how they may correlate that information across various blogs. Especially since some subsets of the blogosphere tend not to link, but they do comment like crazy.
I’ll post more thoughts once I get a chance to use the app.
February 13th, 2006 at 6:56 pm
I think that aggregators should do everything they can to make following comments easy (for example, the subscribe to comments links we have in FeedLounge), however it’s no simple thing to build commenting into a reader. I think it’s do-able, but I think it would likely require some buy-in from the major blog platforms as well.
February 14th, 2006 at 4:49 pm
I’ve been using it for about a week now. It’s been useful in some ways, as I always forget where I post comments, and not so useful in others (a little buggy). All in all, I like where it is going, and am doing my best to use it;)
February 19th, 2006 at 9:34 pm
I’m not on the bandwagon.
February 21st, 2006 at 12:41 pm
As someone who spent a lot of time looking at how to improve comment systems over the past few years, CoComment is really only addressing the lowest hanging fruit at this point. It sure looks neat, adn they got Scoble to basically do the launch for them by mentioning it in their blog - so it gets all the attention at the moment. I am sure there is more to come from them, but the features they have so far limits the nature of the conversation via comments to only people on the cocomment system (very bad)
But you are right Greg - ultimately this is only a feature. I get the same functionality within delicious by tagging posts I care about following with a ‘comments’ tag so I can go back in and see where I have commented on and follow any updates. Granted, no alerts in such a system, but as with most services, it is enough to meet the needs of some people but not everyone.