The first time I tried CoComment I was not impressed at all. Having spent sometime in trying to find out how to bettertrack down conversations on the blogosphere, I couldn't find in CC any answer to all the issues I came up with during my personal experiments. I actually found it pretty useless. To tell you the truth I even thought that the realization itself was too rough and not as elegant as I would like it to be.
Then the monthes passed quickly and no alternative was spotted on the horizon (don't think digg, it's another thing at all), and meanwhile cocomment was growing steady...
Until a few days ago when they came out with a new version that introduces a good number of new features that are truly interesting... and somehow address some of my own early issues:
1. First and foremost, cocommenting is not limited to subscribed users anymore: the system will keep track of ongoing conversations for you from the moment of your first comment onward.
2. Comment lurkers rejoyce! Now you can track comments without even commenting first.
3. Some filtering is being added to conversations, so that's possible to manage the whole thing.
This, in conjunction with the Firefox extension, make the service actually usable and useful. Now I'm quite impressed.
The biggest outstanding issue from my point of view is that it is still usable pretty much only by firefoxers. I tried cocomment back in the days when I was using Safari as my browser of choice and the bookmarklet procedure is just too alien: I sistematically forgot to click on it.
Moreover, I think that the added value of tools like CoComment lies in giving users access to more information without disrupting the nature of the tool. As an alternative, brand new tools and metaphors can be created (enter digg) but, again, that's another story ;)
The other issue (but maybe here we are going out of the tool's primary scope) is that it just tracks comments on a post basis, and not real conversations. On the bright side, it collects tags, that can be somehow useful in aggregating conversations. Still far from the real thing though.
Now, just a suggestion: since to do the cocomment waltz you have to step through it's website anyway... why not to create a nice plugin for newsreaders that allow to comment directly from there? Please make it happen...
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