coComment: Fantastic! Umm, In Theory.

Like most bloggers, I am a person of truly extraordinary vanity and, as such, wherever and whenever I comment, I frequently return to check for replies – or sometimes simply to bask in the glow of whatever idiocy nugget of genius I have left… So unsurprisingly, comment tracking seems like a godsend to me – not only does it offer a simple way to follow online conversations, it also caters to my vaguely OCD approach to online consolidation. After having used co.mments for some time, I recently came across a another promising comment tracking service called coComment. coComment differentiates itself from other services by using a Firefox extension that inserts itself into any comment box it finds, so any comment you make is automatically tracked (unless you tell it not to).

Sounds awesome right? Track every self-important comment you make, and then share with other commenters and even subscribe to their comments, bringing a further social element to the world of blog commenting? Yeah, it would be amazing – if any of it worked. While co.mment was simple, it did what it was supposed to. coComment, after releasing their v2 beta this week, hasn’t worked properly at all. Not only does it track that which you’d never want followed – your Twitters, for example – it often interferes with Firefox and AJAX on other sites. Flickr is unusable, while even basic sites have pauses and glitches while coComment figures things out. To top it all off, it nags you when an update is available but won’t let you actually click on the popup that tells you.

I have no desire to bash the folks over at coComment – after all, they have a really great idea: allow people to track what they’re saying around the web while forming social connections with other commenters. Trouble is, as Scoble points out, a comment tracker that gets in the way of you commenting just isn’t on (you can thank my dad for that phrase: “That’s just not on”). For the time being, I have (reluctantly) disabled the extension in my browser. For such a great idea, I hope the folks over at coComment realise what potential their product has and sort out the bugs and hiccoughs. With the sort of impression they’ve made this week, it can’t be soon enough.