coComment Upgrades to Preserve Industry Leadership

We have already seen way too many startups launched in the blog commenting field with some of them gaining traction and others abandoned days after launch. The latest product that drew attention from the blogosphere was BackType, a nice tool to aggregate blog comments from the entire blogosphere into feeds and allow anyone to track all comments authored by a particular person or containing a certain term you are interested in.

But whenever we talk about a new commenting startup, there is always one product we refer to as an example to all of them - coComment. Duncan Riley even referred to BackType as a “coComment 2.0″ and I think we have all been under an impression that coComment has reached some stability where we should not expect anything beyond what we already have. But we were wrong - yesterday I received an invitation to participate in the early preview of coComment version 3 that was officially launched minutes ago. I was very glad that one of my favourite products (and the Firefox extension that has been with me longer than any other one) received such a deep upgrade.

From the tone of the press release it looks like the guys over at coComment are pretty tired of constant comparisons with various new services as they say that the complete redesign “aims to cement coComment’s functionality leadership” as well as “make it faster, easier and more fun for users to track all of their conversations”.

First of all, today’s upgrade deals a lot with the design of coComment website itself to make it more user-friendly and improve the way a user can easily track all the conversations he choose to be part of. In general I’d say that the redesign of the site reflects some of the hot trends in the web 2.0: for example, it adds functionality to easier discover interesting conversations by giving a more prominent position to popular users, groups, tags, and sites where conversations take place.

As for the off-site features, coComment now makes it easier to use a browser sidebar dedicated to comments tracked by coComment. The sidebar makes it possible to track all the important conversations and browse some other websites at the same time. The browser extension seems to be working same as before but I was told it must become more stable and have an improved performance now.

Finally, today’s release also improves integration of coComment into websites to power their comments. I believe enhancement to websites integration is supposed to increase the number of participating websites from the current 1,500 to something more significant. But here I believe it is definitely worth mentioning that coComment allows users to track all the conversations around the web - independent of coComment integration into the website they leave a comment on (unlike the now-popular Disqus that will only track your conversations from the sites that install the widget). This approach where a service relies on users installing browser extensions instead of making web publishers integrate their commenting system proves to result in huge number of tracked conversations: coComment is reported to track over 22 million conversations from over 280 thousand sites.

I’d definitely say it is a much-needed upgrade for coComment since the previous site looked somewhat boring and far from what we expect to see on a web 2.0 site. Besides, I believe coComment needs to generate some buzz now and then with everybody talking about the new releases to the blog commenting niche and often forgetting about the tool we’ve been using for ages. Yet I think that for coComment it will be easier to build any much-hyped feature (like tracking comments by words contained in them) on the existing foundation than for any startup to come up with such a robust commenting system.