coComment

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

~ the obit ~

the problem cocomment tried to solve was that blog comments lived inside the blog. you left a comment somewhere and walked away. you had no idea if anyone had replied to you unless you remembered which thread you were in and went back to check. cocomment installed a bookmarklet in your browser. the bookmarklet watched for the form submit and shipped a copy of the comment plus the url to its own database. then it polled the source thread for replies and showed everything in one dashboard at cocomment.com.

swisscom innovations funded the build in switzerland. public launch was february 2006. the team was around twelve people. the architecture worked across most major blog platforms of the era (wordpress and movable type included) because it scraped the rendered page rather than asking for an api. it picked up over a million registered users in its first two years, peaking at about 1.3 million by july 2008.

this was not on my radar at the time. i was 22 on ttnet adsl in ankara, leaving comments mostly on donanimhaber and a couple of english-language tech blogs. it never occurred to me to track them. comment threads were short-memory by design back then, and most readers were fine with that. cocomment was solving a problem for a power-blogger class that did not include me.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it actually worked ~

the bookmarklet was the trick that made the rest possible. you dragged "cocomment" to your browser bar, then on any blog form you clicked it before submitting. it captured the comment text plus context and posted to cocomment in the background. the original form submit went through to the source site as normal. later versions shipped as proper firefox extensions so the click step went away. the company also offered a small embed script that blogs could install to make their threads "cocomment enabled" without bookmarklet dependency.

the dashboard sorted your comments by thread and by site. when someone replied to a thread you had touched, cocomment caught the new entry on its next poll and surfaced it as a notification. there was a friend layer on top, so you could subscribe to other people's conversation streams. this was the part that pulled it briefly into the same conversation as friendfeed and jaiku in late 2007.

~ what killed it ~

swisscom was a telco. it told the swiss press in 2006 that it had no plan to become a blog provider, it wanted to use cocomment to learn about the needs of bloggers. that framing was honest, and it was also the problem. there was no revenue model. the service stayed free. swisscom paid the infrastructure bill for six years while the comment-following habit it was built around moved to twitter replies and facebook notifications.

by 2010 the blog comment as a unit was already losing weight. people argued in twitter mentions instead. by 2012 the gap between the running cost and the user base swisscom cared about was big enough that the plug got pulled. the shutdown notice went out in march 2012. no acquisition, no migration tool, no successor product. the bookmarklet stopped pinging the server and the dashboard went dark.

~ what survived ~

the comment-tracking category did not survive cocomment's death. disqus solved the same problem by sitting inside the comment form itself and emailing replies directly, which removed the need for a bookmarklet entirely. the cross-site stream layer that cocomment and friendfeed were both reaching for got absorbed into the twitter timeline. cocomment was the last serious attempt to keep blog comments themselves as a primary surface.

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