Co.mments

» see co.mments.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Comment threads in 2006 had no memory of you. You typed a reply into somebody's blog, hit post, and that was the end of the relationship: no notification, and no way back except retyping the URL and scrolling. Two services launched within weeks of each other to fix it. CoComment, out of Switzerland, followed the comments you had personally written. Co.mments, written by Assaf Arkin, aimed wider.

Michael Arrington covered it for TechCrunch on 18 March 2006 and spent most of the piece explaining that the two products only looked alike. "Co.mments reminds me the most of a sort of highly specialized blog bookmarking tool, focused on keeping all of the posts that you want to track (including comment discussions) in one place," he wrote. "You do not need to leave a comment on the post to track it." That was the whole difference. CoComment needed you to join a conversation before it would follow one. Co.mments let you lurk.

The site's own pitch was flatter and better. It "helps you stay on top of the conversation by keeping you updated of new comments."

~ the dossier ~

~ what it actually did ~

You dragged a bookmarklet onto your toolbar. On any post worth following you clicked it, and the post joined a list. The list had a feed, so the whole thing could disappear into whichever reader you already had open, and there were feeds for group pages as well as personal ones. An account was optional. Without one it tracked you by cookie, which meant the service worked the first time you touched it and only asked for a login if you wanted the same list on a second machine.

By the end of 2006 the front page carried a nav bar with a tracking page and a conversations list, and the December capture is a full working site at around 17 KB. A year later the root had stopped serving a homepage to logged-out visitors at all and simply bounced them to the login form. It stayed that way for fourteen months.

~ where I was reading instead ~

I had TTNet broadband and a university timetable in 2006, and the pages I checked for replies were not blogs. Turkish discussion lived on forums, Donanım Haber and frmtr, and a forum had solved this years earlier with a subscribe button on the thread and a bold marker on anything posted since your last visit. The feature Co.mments had to bolt on from the outside was already sitting inside phpBB. The blogosphere spent 2006 inventing a worse version of something I used daily without noticing it was a feature.

~ no more ~

Tony Karrer, who wrote the eLearning Technology blog, had switched over from CoComment in November 2008. On 6 January 2009 he posted one line about it: he had just received a notice that Co.mments was shutting down. Argh, he added.

The archive puts the switch-off at the end of February. The root still redirected to the login form on 24 February 2009. By 1 March the page at that address was 708 bytes, and under the orange and blue wordmark it said: "no more. I appreciate your support and the chance to provide this service. Now, time to move on." A line at the bottom offered an address for anyone who needed to get in touch.

~ the rebirth notice ~

That was not the last word. Some time over the winter of 2010 the tombstone was swapped for a different page, equally short, reading "coming soon" and then "A few more days left for the rebirth." The archive caught it in February 2010 and again in March. There is no fourth page. By May the address was redirecting, by 2012 it was returning server errors, and today it answers nothing at all.

Arkin is still publishing, two domains over, at labnotes.org. The problem he had picked at got solved from the other side in the end: Disqus moved into the comment form itself and mailed you the reply.

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