comment tracking bliss

Last week there was buzz a blazing about comment tracking in the blog-o-sphere. Something that was long overdue and yet we get a few options kicking up dust.

COcomment - adds its own comment button to post a comment on blogs that have their blog configured as such. The problem I see here is that the blog owner may need to add code to their blog for it to work. Also it only tracks comments of the users of cocomment and not all commenters. This product lacks the features you need to track the entire conversation. Sorry but you need to do better than that in this space.

co.mments.com - uses a simple bookmark, like other bookmarking services, to track the conversations you want. The obvious advantage is you can see the entire conversation. With cocomment you only see comments by those who use the service. For me this is a deal breaker. I want complete tools that will give me the entire conversation. So co.mments is my choice to track my comments.

Some things I would like to see from co.mments.com:

1. A way to drop comments tracked. Most conversations become stale after a week or so. It would be nice to have a user preference to archive tracked conversations after a period of time.
2. Service seems to be slow sometimes. As with most startups, the limitations of infrastucture is always an issue. Acceptable whilst in beta, I hope this service can scale, because I see it to dominate the space in the nexgt few months.
3. A feedback channel or forum. Blog seems sparse with only a few post since opening up.

There has been some talk about using RSS comment feeds for this task. Sure some blogs offer that feature, but conversation tracking tools give you 1 feed to follow with a simple click of the bookmarklet. For me this solution, much like del.icio.us
, is the best option.

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