coComment is Almost Awesome

I really would like to write a recommendation for coComment. It has solved one of the biggest frustrations I have with reading blogs and it’s done it all with an unobstrusive Firefox extension. I would like to do this but I can’t. What I’ll do instead is to explain not only what it does that’s so great but also what it does that’s so annoying you probably won’t want to use it.

But let’s begin with some history. My introduction to blogging occurred largely through LiveJournal and although I have since moved on from LJ to the wonderful world of Wordpress there has always been one thing that LJ offered that Wordpress (or for that matter any other platform I’ve used) has never quite matched: the LJ commenting system. Because although other services offer commenting, for me the difference between LJ and the others is so severe it’s almost as if they don’t. For those that aren’t familiar with LiveJournal I’ll do my best to quickly explain how their system differs from what you’re most likely used to.

First off, unlike most blogs LJ comments are threaded which makes it relatively easy for people to diverge without derailing the discussion. It makes it particularly easy for users to follow conversations that they were interested in without needing to skip over every second post that was about something else completely different. I found it encouraged conversations not just between the author and a commenter but between commenters in a way that flat threaded displays (ie. everyone else) doesn’t. For this reason I’ve tried to emulate threading here on inqk, although it’s nowhere near as sophisticated as what you’d get at LiveJournal.

The second element of the commenting system, and really the most important, was email notification. Simply put: once you had commented on a post, LiveJournal would email you whenever someone replied to your comment. Due to the aforementioned threading this wouldn’t mean you were deluged with mountains of spam but rather would easily know when someone had added something new. Instead of having to check back at regular intervals to see what comments had been added to a particular post, LJ made it easy to post, forget and come back when there was something relevant to you. This meant real conversations could happen that would continue long after a post had dropped off the front page of someone’s LiveJournal. Too often on Blogger blogs or Wordpress blogs things seem to peter out just as they’re getting started (see this almost interesting discussion on TechCrunch about Facebook). People talk about blogs breaking down the division between writers and readers but when the reader has to check every post they’ve commented on at regular intervals it seems to me that barrier is still pretty darn high.

It’s this problem that coComment tries to address and one that it very nearly solves. Essentially it keeps track of the posts you’ve commented on. There are alternative ways to do this, of course. Most blogs include some sort of RSS feed for comments (see?) but having to subscribe to a feed for every post you comment in quickly grows tiresome. coComment automates this process (after you have installed the Firefox extension) and gives you one page you can go to to see what’s been going on. It’s simple, it’s easy and it’s a perfect solution to the problem. Since it runs out of a Firefox extension in the user’s browser it doesn’t require any effort by the blog author (meaning it works with pretty much every blog on Earth as of right now) and if you’re not interested it’s not there bugging you.

So if this is all so great what’s the problem? The problem – and it’s seems so small it’s incredible it’s still there – is that if you don’t want coComment to track posts at a particular domain (like, say, LiveJournal) there is no easy way to do this. Instead, you have to manually disable coComment for every post you comment on. This is almost as frustrating as needing to subscribe to individual RSS feeds. In solving one problem, the coComment people have merely created another. It’s a shame because I really think this is a genuinely useful service and this seems like such a small thing it really shouldn’t be a problem. Unfortunately, it’s a problem people have been making noise about since last year and still nothing’s been done.

I’m going to keep using it but until this is addressed I won’t be recommending it to anyone else. If you use it, or used it, let me know what you thought. Is there an easy way around this I just haven’t realised? Or is this not really a big deal to you?