Written on September 13, 2008 – 11:18 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Cocomment, the tracking tool for the comments you leave all over the web, has enhanced its usability by improving its design and several important background processes. It now has the “version 3″ label. Thruth be told, version 2 did look a bit amateurish, something you can’t say about the new one. Although the icons can be shinier. But hey, let’s focus on the bigger picture here.
CoComment claims to be first and largest comment tracking service, with more than 4.1 million unique users per month. The Swiss-based service has tracked over 22 million conversations from more than 280,000 sites, blogs, and social networks. But competition is fierce. Start-ups like Disqus, SezWho, and Intense Debate offer similar services and are quite popular in the blogosphere. No wonder CEO Matt Colebourne and his team felt the urge to keep reviewing and improving the service.
One move in this respect is particularly interesting: a partnership with Retaggr, the visual business cards service that participated in our Five Questions for Start-ups series earlier this week. This London-based service enriches your comment with personal data and provides links to your social networks.
This partnership between Retaggr and CoComment is actually a really good match, since:
- CoComment can now offer its users an excellent tool that represents their online identity. Something competitor Disqus already offered.
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Retaggr is now also available on sites that weren’t compatible with their plugin. Now it doesn’t matter anymore, as long as someone is using CoComment. And as you can tell by the numbers mentioned in this article, there are quite a few of them.
I hope you like that post!
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Written on September 9, 2008 – 12:00 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Every once in a while we publish an interview with a start-up. We ask five questions, hoping the answers will give you inspiration and new views.
This time we’re interviewing Ivailo Jordanov. He’s the co-founder of Retaggr, a service with which you can manage and publicize your own business card. It’s possible to include widgets and links to your social network profiles. Whenever a blog owner has made his page Retaggr compatible, a little pop-up shows up with the essential info about the person. Sort of like the Firefox LinkedIn plugin. I’ve reviewed them earlier and I figured these guys would be interesting for the Five Questions for Start-up series. The main reason for this? Retaggr have to activate the crowd as well as web publishers to make the company a success. So here it goes.
How did you come up with the idea of Retaggr?
“There were a number of factors which led us to the idea. The first was the frustration we found ourselves not being able to find a way to aggregate all the places we had created online identities and allow others to connect with us a relevant service. The second was that we wanted to be able find out what services our friends and contacts used that we might want to use too.
As people started using retaggr as a central point for showing all the elements of their online identity we started looking at ways to make it truly portable anywhere on the web and make it more useable. As a result, we launched the blog plug-in and the email signatures as well as made it possible to retaggr-enable any site to provide extended profile information for a site’s users.
The reason for the blog plug-in was the fact that reading blogs or forums and wanting to find more information about the people posting comments and interacting on them is a challenge of multiple clicks on most sites. Knowing more about a content contributor is important as comments are perceived as more or less credible based on who made them. This also allows people to connect or see how they are connected with the contributors. Some people put a link to their blog, but not everyone has a personal blog where all their information is listed. Also, the constant clicking away from reading the content to see who the author is can be frustrating and our blog plug-in provides a solution for that by embedding the card directly inside the blogs (users can still have the link to their blog with their comment too). (more…)
Written on July 14, 2008 – 1:22 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
WebTipr David Petherick from the UK is working in the online reputation management business, so I always trust him when it comes to tips about this sector. His last one: Atomkeep. This service merges a large number of services into one profile. Just add them by giving your login credentials - using the clean and good-looking Ajax interface.
One slick profile page
The result is interesting, since Atomkeep allows you to merge fields from - for example - LinkedIn and Facebook which leads to surprising combinations like quotes and groups. Thus sending a link to your Atomkeep page might come in handy when somebody wants to know you better, since it combines professional and personal information in a stylish way.
No automatic syncing
Although Atomkeep almost seamlessly integrates these profiles - I only found error: it recognized Amsterdam as a country (?) -, you’ll have to manually sync the services once in a while. Automatic syncing isn’t available (yet). It gets worse, because when you press the big green sync button, you’ll have to fill in all the passwords again - due to safety restrictions. I hope they’ll come up with an option to store passwords in an encrypted way.
There’s a badge too
Of course Atomkeep has an embeddable piece of content too - as no online reputation management tool can’t live without that -, forcing itself to enter the battle field of British start-ups IDlasso and Retaggr (read review here). Although all tree services have certain USP’s - e.g. Retaggr offers blog comments integration -, I don’t see people using more than one. Taking this in account, I give Atomkeep a high chance of becoming a successful service. For one simple reason: the service looks pretty damn good. The clean lay-out immediately gives Atomkeep a professional look and thus a sense of trustworthiness.
Written on June 24, 2008 – 9:54 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
I just got a new stack of business cards. Since I’m working in the web industry, they keep flying away from my hands. Web professionals are just eager to get connected, so sometimes they hand over their card while still introducing themselves. Not my really my style, as I like to get an impression of a person, and then see his card. That way I won’t forget the faces by 75 percent of the cards I collect throughout a conference. But hey, that’s just not how it goes in the 2.0 world. So it’s not surprising that services like London-based Retaggr pop up.
Co-founder Ivailo Jordanov mailed me that his service allows people to consolidate their online presence by creating interactive business cards where they can add widgets and links for all their online profiles and data. Whenever a site/ blog owner has made his page Retaggr compatible, a little pop-up shows up with the essential info about the person. Sort of like the Firefox LinkedIN plugin. You can also tag photos, like your Facebook friends do. It looks like this:
This feature totally fits in the whole idea of giving away your card in the wink of an eye, a blog comment is reason enough - so I guess most Web 2.0 people like it.
Jordanov and his team will have to give a lot of business cards themselves these days, as their service lives or dies with the adoption by blogs and sites. He told me that they’ll be announcing some interesting partnerships - like the one they closed with the Italian version of Twitter, BeeMood.com. Only then, Retaggr might become serious competition for services with a similar feature (think Disqus).
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