I put six months of my life into CoComment, so I’m proud it became public and picked the attention of bloggers out there. As Robert puts it, cocomment finally allows you to track your blog comments around the web no matter when you make them. It’s the first time one of my project makes it to TechCrunch so I guess this is a big day. We’re even on Memeorandum !
So what is CoComment exactly? It’s the answer to a problem most bloggers have. Four problems in fact:
• Comments centralization
Commenting on blogs is like planting a seed in the jungle. You better put some flashing laser beams around your stuff or you are going to lose it. This is where cocomment comes in
» CoComment will keep a copy of what you said so you can find your contributions again. In a neat and centralized view.
• Comments follow up
This is probably feature number one in terms of usefulness. Today, following conversations you participated in is like reading blogs without RSS. It’s painful as if it was 2001 all over again. You try to track conversations but nothing changed, you just lost some precious time.
» Cocomment will tell you when somebody comments after you. You save some time, everybody is happy.
• Comments display
Comments are part of what you do. At least as much as blog posts. So why can’t you show them on your blog?
» Cocomment does just that. You comment on a blog, your readers know it immediately, and they can follow your wanderings around the sphere.
• 100 comments ≠ 100 links
This is completely false but nobody ever told you. Links were the only indicators of what was hot until today. Now a service will be able to tell you what conversations are really hot. Bonus side effect: what’s really piquing people’s interest will get detected earlier, and conversation will converge on the original source. No more global micro-conversations (= people restarting conversation in their own blog), but one global conversation where all relevant information is finally kept together.
I am proud of what we did. Really. I think it’s a huge step forward, and it will potentially make the life of hundreds of people much easier.
I am happy to share the credit of the idea with Nicolas Dengler, and big thanks to Peter Balsinger’s team, Marco Chong, and Christopher Ritz. Great job from the Swisscom Innovation people.