Track Comments with Co.mments

Co.mments

I've been using for months now and Co.mments is by far my favourite way to track comments on a site.

How does it work? Through the use of a bookmarklet, I just hit a button on a page whose comments I wish to track. It doesn't matter if the site uses WordPress, Movable Type or a custom home-grown solution. And you don't have to leave a comment in order to continually track the page.

Even better, you don't even have to create an account to use it. It'll remember the sites you're tracking through the use of a cookie. If you do create an account then you have them safely stored if something happens to your cookie or if you want to access your account from another browser or computer.

When tracking sites, it'll ping and update with the number of new comments. You can even read the new comments right from Co.mments without having to return to the site. With that said, it's not perfect. It must have some algorithm for determing comments on a page and certain HTML structures prevent it from pulling out comment text or updating the number of new comments. The accuracy, in my opinion, is still really good, though. Probably around 95%.

For those blogs that don't get tracked properly, at least I have a central place to keep an eye on articles that I wish to check back on.

After the discussion has died down and I'm no longer interested in tracking the page, I simply remove it from the list.

If you need a handy way to track conversations, I recommend you head on over to Co.mments.com and give it a try.

Published July 04, 2007
Categorized as Other
Short URL: https://snook.ca/s/832

Conversation

27 Comments · RSS feed
fathima said on July 04, 2007

coComment (http://www.cocomment.com/) does much the same thing. It's slightly prettier though and there it has a community feel to it, what with "Top Commenters" and favourites and such.
It's funny how they have such similar things. I mean, I understand why the emphasis on the word "comment," but even still ...

fathima said on July 04, 2007

"such similar names .." ack. sorry.

Jonathan Snook said on July 04, 2007

I had looked at coComment when it was first released and it was limited at the time. It looks like they've expanded the feature set to include much of what co.mments does. Just playing with it now, I like the interface of coComment but I find the interface slow to load (at least through the bookmarklet...the firefox add-on is probably faster). co.mments does have the added bonus that you don't have to signup or login. Definitely pros and cons between them. I might have to give coComment another go.

Tim McCormack said on July 04, 2007

Last I checked, both services have a hell of a time picking out comments on non-standard templates. I wrote up an algorithm and sent it to the cocomment folks, but they don't seem to have progressed any farther.

I'm getting sick of cocomment. Their javascript is super slow, and the extension bogs firefox down horribly. Don't use it.

AdamD said on July 04, 2007

I had heard about these long ago, but hadn't ever given it a shot. I'll be checking it out now, starting with this thread!

Evan said on July 04, 2007

Yet another: commentful.com

Jermayn Parker said on July 04, 2007

The thing that gets me about blogs and that is whenever I make a comment I like the option of adding another one, however with viewing so many a week, its hard unless they have a subscription option.

I cant view this at work at the moment (net filter) but will this solve this problem? If so, I am up for it :)

Yuccaplant said on July 04, 2007

the cocomment firefox plugin is awesome

Richard Rutter said on July 05, 2007

I have been using coComment for a while, and I've enabled it on my (homemade) blog engine. Although I have signed up (to keep a central record of my comments), I think you can still do the cookie-based commenting. I liked coComment because it also provided an API so I could extract my comments and track them elsewhere.

Richard Rutter said on July 05, 2007

The trouble with both of these systems though, is that if you forget to click the bookmarklet instead of the 'add comment' button, the tracking doesn't work so well.

matthew said on July 05, 2007

cocomment.com user here, I tried co.omment.com a while ago but found it very cludgy in comparison. cocomment.com also has the script you can add to your blog to automate a lot of it for your users.

matthew said on July 05, 2007

Also, when I used co.mment.com there was some kind of a bug with the system and it add HUNDREDS of posts to follow which I never commented on, so I got my account removed.

Miles said on July 05, 2007

I hate how alot of sites have a period in the name for no reason. lol.

Tim McCormack said on July 05, 2007

If anyone wants to start their own comment tracking system with a better interface, here's a comment extraction algorithm, free for the taking.

Mike said on July 06, 2007

The only problem with co.mments is that it is frequently unavailable. Other than that it's a Godsend for someone like me who regularly comments on new sites that I find. Like this one, for example.

andrej said on July 06, 2007

I definitely like the design, straight forward, easy to use and just the functionality I needed ;) you can even subscribe to it.

Aaron Bassett said on July 06, 2007

Looks interesting, I had heard/seen coComments before but it seemed very Javascript heavy and quite sluggish so I gave it a miss.

co.mments doesn't seem to suffer from this so will be giving it a try - infact am tracking these comments right now ;)

Stu said on July 08, 2007

Cool idea, nice to know. I just think I will be wasting more time using it :D

fathima said on July 09, 2007

The irony is that cocomments has yet to track any of the comments on this post. In fact, I don't even see the usual blue options bar beneath this textbox.

Jonathan Snook said on July 09, 2007

@fathima: but co.mments.com seems to be working fine. Good thing I recommended the right service. ;)

Vingana said on July 13, 2007

Cookies bad... I'm surprised you're embracing them so.

Jonathan Snook said on July 13, 2007

@Vingana: cookies aren't inherently bad. In fact, they're quite good from a personalization point of view. And this is a prime example: if somebody did manage to get access to the cookies for this site, they'd manage to get a client_id which might allow them to view the articles I'm tracking. That's information I'd readily share. Do some further research before you paint cookies in such a bad light.

Laurent said on July 24, 2007

Having tried cocomment, commentful and co.mments, I've settled for co.mments. I love its simplicity. Plus in my tests it handled more blogs than the other two services, but your milleage might vary (furthermore it was months ago).
The only downside of co.mments is that it's the "smallest" one of the three, hence its reliability and availability might not be the best. For instance a few weeks ago a problem with the server resulted in a pruning of old conversations. I lost about 2/3 of my conversations. Although those had died for lack of new comments I kept them in my list as some kind of history. I was sad when they disappeared. :(

Carly said on July 27, 2007

If your a coComments user as well as a Firefox user, the coComments plugin for Firefox is excellent. It's been around since approx August last year so it's quite stable and functional.

Well worth installing my 497th Firefox Plugin. (Joke but it feels that way with the sheer number of neat Firefox extensions available)

Carly,

Chris Pallé said on August 01, 2007

Did anybody else notice their co.mments feed drop off and restart with a different name?

Chris said on August 11, 2007

This is kind of a sore subject for me. Back in the day, I was happy with co.mment. It did the purpose it was intended to do, but as I started to track more comments I desired more features.

1. When I click the bookmarklet it should clear the RSS feed (why do I want to be notified about comments I have already made?

2. co.mments did a horrific job of picking up feeds on anything other than a blog. For instance, trying to get it to detect a feed on the WordPress forum (which is RSS enabled) never worked.

These two things were big enough to make me look again at coComment which, like you, I was not impressed with in the beginning. The Firefox plugin is ok, but it does add some load time to pages. It did provide a feed that did not post comments I've already read.

The big thing is how horrific the coComment interface is. They recently changed it, and I think it actually got worse. It was looking good, but then it went downhill.

Anyway, I've had conversations with Assaf of co.mments, and it seems as though he's stopped doing development on the app (as the co.mments blog suggests). Sore, sore subject.

Pelton said on January 16, 2009

Greeting. To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best day and night to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.
I am from Japan and also now am reading in English, give true I wrote the following sentence: "Basic principles of writing powerful and effective resumes from the rockport institute."

THX :p, Pelton.

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