Congratulations coComment, You Blew It

As long-time readers of this blog might be aware I have something of a love-hate relationship with coComment. I want to like it. I even want to use their Firefox extension. When they make that all but impossible to use I’ll even resort to using their bookmarklet which requires me to manually activate it on every page I write a comment on. Well I’m worried that someone might read those entries in the distant future and think that I was recommending the use of the worst web service ever so I’ve decided to issue you a warning. coComment has been driven into the ground. It is now the worst web service ever.

Yes, that’s right. Worst. Web. Service. Ever.

I’m having to resort to hyperbole because it’s all I have left. It appears as if rational argument can’t convince those crazy Swiss guys to go back to their original design. Even floods of users departing their site doesn’t do any good. No, as far as I can tell the only thing that might possibly get through to them is for someone to call them out as the most terrible web 2.0 experience out there.

This is, of course, not true. There are plenty of truly horrible services in existence and coComment isn’t quite challenging them (yet). But what breaks the heat of anyone who really enjoyed using their product (read: me) was that they have, with a single redesign to their site, completely ruined it. And for seemingly no reason. The old site worked! Sure, I had problems with the Firefox extension but the site itself worked. No longer! It’s now awfully slow, completely unreliable, terrible to use and boasts a colour scheme that only a mother could love. A colour-blind, epileptic monkey. On acid.

The brilliance of coComment before was that it made following comments easy. You could see all the threads you were subscribed to and quickly view new comments to see if anyone had left anything interesting to say (read: related to what you’d said). To do the same thing now is incredibly tedious (and blinding). Now you’re presented with a list of threads you’re subscribed to. They ones that have been updated are bolded (you might think the green dot next to them indicates their status but you’d be wrong). To view them you have to click on each one and then wait. Probably go do some other stuff while you wait because it could be a while. Eventually the page will load and then you can see the new comments. Want to view the next thread? Click back. Wait. Wait. Wait some more. Keep waiting. OK, here you are. Click on the next thread. Guess what? Time to wait again!

See a pattern here? They made what was once a tedious experience (visiting every page you’d commented on) and made it more tedious! I cannot emphasise enough just how bad it now is compared to what it was. I can’t think of anything like it. I’m sure there must be examples in the tech world where a great service was run completely into the ground. If you can think of any suggest them in the comments. What did you do? Were you able to turn it around? How?

I really just wanted to write this as a public service announcement more than anything else. Lest anyone think I was recommending the service I am not. Please do not use coComment. I don’t like most of their competitors much either so I don’t know what to suggest in the alternative. Go outside and hug a tree, I guess. They’re still working great.