Archive of TheNextWeb.org
Written on August 1, 2008 – 11:23 am
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
Yesterday Firef.ly went into open beta. In case you were wondering: .LY is the top level domain extension for Lybia.
Firefly is officially a chat service but could just as easily be describes as ‘Twitter on other sites’. Site owners add two lines of Javascript to their pages and get a widget that gives their users the option to add little floating text balloons on pages.
The service looks very simple to use and extremely cute. All images are shiny and well designed and installation and usage are very simple. That’s the good news.
The bad news is that contrary to Twitter the chat is extremely fragmented. Competitors to Twitter never take off because everybody keeps coming back to Twitter. Firef.ly is everywhere an might as well be nowhere.
Then there is the debatable value of the comments. It is a problem that affects a lot of annotation, (DISCLOSURE: I started Fleck.com, another annotation service) chat and comment services. Given the chance to say something it often turns out that most people don’t actually have anything to say. As you can see in the screenshot a typical Firef.ly enriched site generates a bit of uninteresting buzz on a page but hardly any meaningful conversation.
That doesn’t mean the whole service is useless though. If you have a site with a large userbase and tight community it might be interesting to see what happens if you add Firef.ly to your website. Give it a try and let us know how it works for you.
I hope you like that post!
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Written on July 1, 2008 – 9:01 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Although most people are slowly getting used to the idea of Web 2.0, the third version of the web is knocking on our doors. The last couple of years, we’ve embraced the wisdom of crowds - inviting anyone to create content and guide us through the web. Yet now most of us feel it’s time to manage that overabundance of content and ask for experts to give us a hand while discovering the web. With experts I mean people who have proved to know more than average about a certain subject. Call them mavens if you want. Mahalo and Topicle are examples of services who already embraced these people, Swiss conversations online tracker coComment is about to do the same.
Matt Colebourne at The Next Web conference
For those of you who don’t know what coComment is, CEO Matt Colebourne has sent me a short summary of what they do: “The core functionality of coComment is to enable users in managing their conversations across the web. Additionally, users can utilize coComment in discovering conversations they want to participate in or people they want to follow, as we track over 17 million conversations across 280,000 sites.”
The discovering part, that’s where the experts come in. The new community features include ranking and rating of comments by user and by tag to make it easy to find specific conversations or people. “This”, says the press release, “enables the best conversations, rather than simply the most prolific, to become much more visible and accessible”. So coComment users can qualify comments based on the reputation of the commenter. Therefore, people can find the best discussions and conversation by following certain people who function as conversation leaders, simply because they add the most value to a discussion.
A nice extra for bloggers and publicists is that they can check whether visitors like the discussions about their publications. This way, coComment offers us more insight in the value of the much-discussed phenomenon of online conversations.
Written on May 6, 2008 – 3:10 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
We have just installed a new WordPress plug-in that allows readers to tag their own comments. The tags are hosted on the Commentag.com server and do not interfere with your search ranking or existing comment infrastructure. It is simply an add on with some functionality to make it easier to sort through comments. Although the company has launched in early April they haven’t done any marketing until now.
The service was started by three friends; Xavier Damman (24), Arnaud Coomans (25) and Olaf Witkowski (24). Two of them live in London and one works from Belgium.
From the Commentag blog: “The idea came to my mind with a blog I created about 4×4. It fostered many comments and a journalist who wanted to know the most common arguments (either for or against SUV). Unable to provide a quick answer, we imagined a system which could deal with that particular issue.”
So they came up with a simple tool to Tag comments and a Tag cloud to quickly navigate comments. So now, when you think a post sucks you can leave a comment and tag your comment: ‘Sucks’. The next commenter will be presented with a suggestionbox for tags and one of them will be ‘Sucks’. He can then choose to include the ‘Sucks’ tag in his comment too. Or maybe he will use ‘Brilliant’.
Someone reading the post and wanting to find out how many negative comments there are can then click the ‘Sucks’ tag in the tagcloud and all comments that aren’t tagged ‘Sucks’ will be hidden. Then you can deselect the ‘Sucks’ tag and highlight all the posts tagged ‘Brilliant’.
For blogs that receive dozens of comments on each post this will be a great way to add some sense to their comments section. Being able to quickly look at all positive VS negative posts could be a great tool for reader and possibly stimulate them to comment even more.
We will be testing the Commentag plug-in here and look forward to getting a lot of tagged comments on this post.
Written on January 10, 2008 – 8:11 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Every week we publish an interview with a start-up. We ask five questions, hoping the answers will give you inspiration and new views. Well, actually six questions, since we also ask the start-up to who he or she is passing the mic.
This week’s start-up is coComment, a service that makes it possible to keep track of all the comments and discussions your are participating in or observing on the web. Moreover, if you’re a blogger, you can publish the comments you’re making throughout the blogosphere. The company is based in Geneva, Switzerland. They’re funded by Swisscom Innovations. We’re interviewing Matt Colebourne, CEO of coComment.
How did you guys come up with the idea for coComment?
“It was our CSO, Nicolas Dengler, who came up with it. He found that as the number of blogs grew it became absolutely impossible to keep track with the comments he was leaving. At first, it was just a simple proof of concept idea, but after discussions with a number of prominent bloggers it was launched at the Lift Conference. Yet, still as an early stage idea.
The response was so fantastic that the imperative became to found a company and to build a product that was robust, general and generic enough that it was applicable not only to the blogger community, but also to the increasingly large number of users commenting on general media sites.
Nicolas and the technology team came up with the new, social coComment. Based on a number of workshops and advice both internal and external and feedback from our users. coComment 2.0 Beta release was buggy and not very well received. Though quickly thereafter we were able to refine it into the award-winning product that we now offer.” (more…)
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The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show of, the future of the Web. (
