CoComment seems to be getting quite a bit of blog airtime over the past couple of days…could it be the next Technorati? I actually think it has the potential to be that and oh so much more. A couple of stats from their blog:
They have also posted a thread calling for some community feedback; my .02 is on there. They definitely have their work cut out for them, and I hope they don’t lose sight of what they’re really trying to accomplish. They need to focus on features, and not on getting support for every single blogging engine under the sun. So long as they can publish a consistent and easy to use API, the engine developers (or plug-in developers) will catch on and do the work for them and they can put their talents to work elsewhere.
I also feel (as I mentioned on that thread) that the “bookmarklet” approach needs to be scrapped ASAP before people get too used to it because once they do it’ll be impossible to get rid of without causing some gripes. I’m all for having a CoComment icon of some sort embedded in the post/comment box/etc and allowing users to sign in to specific sites thus letting CoComment know that they want all future comments to that site tracked. Then you can fire and forget about it; the blog engine itself takes care of pinging CoComment (this is pretty much the standard way stuff like this is done anyways). The bookmarklet is just too cumbersome.
I’ve added a link to my right hand sidebar linking to my CoComments conversations page (not a lot of threads there yet, mainly because the majority of blogs I visit aren’t supported “out of the box” yet by CoComment, which is why the word really needs to be spread to engine developers as to just how easy it is to embed coco support).
And to wrap this post up, here’s a couple of goodies for you:
- The unofficial CoComment plugin for Firefox (this is good for blogs where the comment page is a pop-up and the bookmarklet isn’t accessible).
- I have 1 CoComment invitation to dole out. First person to ping me via the comments with your email address gets it.
It’s great to catch technology like this from the early stages, and I like the fact that the folks over at coco have been pretty responsive to requests from the community…this type of open box development (like we do on Community Server) provides a win-win situation for everyone involved, and is also a great way to gain some insight into the folks behind the code as well. Best of luck to CoComment…I know I’ll do my part!
Posted
Feb 10 2006, 04:12 PM
by
Jayson Knight