Asa Dotzler: Firefox and more

The last week has been a disaster for most coComment users. I'm one of them.

I don't want the good folks at coComment to think I'm bashing, because I'm not. They've got a very talented group of people tackling an increasingly important problem, keeping up with conversations on the web. So, I hope this is taken in the best possible light -- as constructive criticism towards a service I'd like to continue using.

coComment, in its previous iteration offered a very simple solution to a difficult problem. There are more and more people who are commenting in an ever-growing pool of weblogs and keeping up with all of those threads scattered across the web is nearly impossible. Until Cocomment, I simply bookmarked all of the blog posts where I was participating in or just following the comment discussion and then each day I'd check back to see if there were new comments or responses to what I'd said.

coComment provides a web service that aggregates the blog posts you're interested in following. They offer two useful tools for accomplishing this task, a bookmarklet or Firefox add-on for delivering the blog post and comment thread to the coComment infrastructure when a user posts a comment, and a pretty nice web application for following the various discussions.

The Firefox extension was pretty simple. It offered a small toolbar that attached to the bottom of a weblog's comment box and a Firefox statusbar notification icon. The commenting toolbar allowed you to enable or disable coComment right there where you were making your comment. It also allowed you to tag the comment for easier searching or organizing in the coComment web application. The statusbar icon serves two functions. It offers a menu that replicates the enable/disable feature of the comment toolbar and it changes color to indicate whether or not it is active and if you have new follow-up comments ready for reading back at the coComment web service.

The coComment web service was also pretty simple and quite efficient. The key part was the "your conversations" section that listed each of the blog posts a user was following. Each post had a twisty next to it that would expand it to show the comment thread underneath. It did more, for example allowing a user to stop following a blog post, mark all the comments for a post as read, etc. The main point here, though, is that it was a pretty simple interface that served its major purpose quite well.

Now, both of these tools, the Firefox extension and the web service had bugs and some missing features that many users though would be important. For me, and several others commenting at the coComment user forums and blogs, a key missing feature was the ability to tell coComment, either from the Firefox extension or from the web service "never track conversations for this blog". Another problem was that it didn't work with every blog, though the major blogging platforms with "normal" themes all seemed to work fine. There were a handful of smaller issues around the less important features of the service but I was mostly satisfied.

Until last week when they started rolling out the beta of coComment v2.

Not only did they fail to address the problems with the current feature set, but they broke much of what was already working well. First, the extension is mostly useless now because a new v2 feature, an ever-present floating icon that sits in the top right of the web page. This icon floats on top of the web page's content and can be expanded into a toolbar so that coComment users can comment on and track any pages, even if they don't have commenting systems. In theory this is a nice idea, but the problem with this is that it breaks so many sites or just annoys users by blocking view of the page's content that it's caused me and other users to disable the whole Firefox extension. And that's on top of their not adding that most wanted blacklist feature. So, I'm back to using the bookmarklet which isn't nearly as cool or useful as the previous version of extension.

The service has also suffered. It is much less usable now that they altered the main "your conversations" section. Rather than letting you see all of the blog comment threads on one page with nice little expanding/collapsing accordion-like listings, now you have launch each thread in a new page and the navigation on that new page doesn't make it obvious how to get to the next and previous threads. In addition, they've added about a dozen new features focused on building communities ("your coComment friends, groups, favorites, followers and conversational neighbors", as they put it,) something I'm not at all interested in. Theses features overwhelm the user interface of the coComment web service, making the most basic, and useful tasks more difficult to find or access.

Finally, this is all beta but users are essentially forced to migrate from the previous version to this beta which has many small bugs and much more frequent service outages and login problems. They did have a private beta, but I think forcing this public beta on all of their users was a bit premature.

So, those are my big complaints. I said I wanted to make this constructive so I'll focus now on what I think they should do going forward.

coComment needs to nail the basics. The core function of coComment is giving users an easy way to track all of their conversations in one place. This needs to be rock solid.

The Web Service
1. Default to the My coComments -> my conversations -> me page, not the top level of My coComments. Exploring the cocommunity is not terribly useful, yet, and my groups and friends and favorites are just empty and useless blocks for me and many others.
2. Return to the accordion conversation expanding/collapsing widget from the previous version.
3. Add title tips for all links and UI elements on the page so the user knows what the heck is gonna happen when she clicks on something. I don't want to click on a link named "coColink" or "delete" until I know what exactly cocolinking is or until I know precisely what I'm deleting and from where.
4. Make conversations with new messages a lot more visible. The link color just isn't a good enough indicator.
5. Improve the infrastructure capacity and fix bugs to allow users to stay logged in. Right now, I'm having to log in again many times a day.
6. Drop the sidebar or pull it back to the private beta until it's more than a broken skeleton.
7. Fix the bug with Latest comment time which is showing up in seconds for at least Firefox 3 users.

The Firefox Extension
1. Fix whatever bugs or infrastructure problems that are preventing my posts from going through and add error handling to the toolbar so that if there's a failure at coComment the user is prompted to "submit anyway, without tracking at co-comment" or "try again." Under no circumstance should a user be prevented from commenting.
2. Make the toolbar work for more blogs.
3. Move the functionality of the floating toolbar thing to the statusbar popup or otherwise out of the content area.
4. Add the "blacklist this entire site" feature that defaults to blacklisting the entire domain but can be edited to use a simple regular expression like "blacklist: weblogs.foo.com/bar*" so that it can work for multi-blog sites. (Even better would be to add logic to do that without user intervention.)
5. Fix whatever bugs in the extension are causing any site breakage. Co-comment should not impact the page layout or functionality for any pages on the web. period.
6. change the - and + icons next to track and share. Why would you associate "track" with a minus sign?
7. Add meaningful title tips to all of your toolbar buttons and links and fields. Repeating the name of the button in the title tip isn't sufficient.
8. Ensure that the toolbar width is the same as the width of the posting box and that it aligns correctly with the bottom (or top) of the box.
9. Implement extension preferences that allow for the selective disabling/enabling of all of the features for the extension.
10. Make the drop-down menu button on the main coComment toolbar require a click rather than just a mouse-over. Right now it's too easy to accidentally obscure the close button on your way to clicking it.

Oh, and one other thing, get your Forums working so people can give feedback there. I've been getting MySQL connection errors for a couple of days now.