coComment: Lets you track your blog comments. Here’s where it falls short…
UPDATE: coComment developers indicated that they’ve fixed some of the problems I’ve shared. If you need technical support or want to suggest a feature, they have an active forum for addressing usability issues and more. Hat tip to Stephanie for sharing her perspectives on coComment as well.
You’ll often hear everyone in the blogosphere rave about the latest and the greatest, but not everything always works the way they were advertised. coComment is one such example, and I really wanted to like it a lot. Here are reasons why I am giving it a thumbs down:
1. Missing a step kills the joy…
While the bookmarklet feature makes the tracking process quite simple, I sometimes forget to hit the coComment button before posting my comment. There is no undo for this step. Instead of the bookmarlet, CoComment really needs to make a browser plugin or extension to make the entire process transparent.
2. Doesn’t work everywhere…
Yup, simply put, it didn’t work on all WordPress blogs (perhaps they get too customized sometimes) and it didn’t work for any blogger.com ones either. I think these two blog engines make up for more than 75% of the blogs out there. Major Bummer.
3. Comment tracking issues…
I assumed that coComment tracks entire comment treads, not just what I alone posted on someone’s blog. Well, it worked for others, but not me. It didn’t do anything beyond giving me a bookmarked list of comments I made, complete with what I wrote and providing this as an RSS feed. Don’t believe me? Compare the comments tracked on my coComments with the actual comments on Popagandhi’s post on the 1gb iPod nano. coComment only reflect my one comment, while there were six on that post. What’s up homie?
4. Equivalent Del.icio.us hack for coComment
Because of my earlier point, we can ALREADY do what coComment does by using existing technology. Steve Rubel once said how brillant Elisa Camahort was to use a specific del.icio.us tag to track blog comments… simple, zero-learning curve, and yes, you can subscribe to that tag’s RSS feeds. She called her tag “Commented” as you can see it in action here.
So after a week of CoCommenting, I doubt I’ll use it anymore. I’ll probably switch to using the abovementioned idea of substituting it with the omnipotent Del.icio.us instead. Let me know if I’ve missed out something big here, because I definitely don’t see the unique selling point of CoComment anymore.
Aside: I think some users are already gaming the “Most Comments” segment on the front page of CoComment.com. To appear as a top commenter, just CoComment you own comments on your own blog a gazillion times.
