Comment Tracking With Co.mments.com

This is embarrassing to admit, but before I found Co.mments.com, I would either bookmark the websites of conversation threads I wanted to follow or copy the URL into a word document. I would then revisit these conversations every couple of days to see if anyone had responded to my comments or posted new, interesting comments.

This was bulky and time consuming. Luckily, for any web activity you can imagine, someone has come up with a better way to do it! When signing up for a new Co.mments.com account, you are asked to drag the Co.mments bookmarklet into your Firefox toolbar. From that point on, whenever you are on a forum, blog post, or other site where a discussion is taking place, bookmark it using your Co.mments bookmarklet, and the conversation is tracked for you. You don’t have to make a comment to use Co.mment.com, it works just the same whether you are actively commenting or just want to read what other people are saying.

You can receive updates in your feed reader or by email whenever new comments are added to the conversations you are tracking. Your conversations are tracked on one page, and it’s easy to remove conversations when you no longer wish to track them.

Co.mments.com launched sometime in early 2006, so it did take me a while to discover this service, but I’m sure glad I did. It’s simple and unobtrusive, and if the service is down you lose only the ability to track comments, unlike its competitor CoComments which also loses the ability to place comments.

Try it out and let me know what you think.