Comments on: Please Don’t Be Rude, coComment. I Loved You.

By: Climb to the Stars (Stephanie Booth) » More on coComment Advertising

Climb to the Stars (Stephanie Booth) » More on coComment Advertising — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 22:59:08 +0000

[...] preparing to slap ads in our comment RSS feeds, coComment is staying on the same ugly and obviously slippery slope by inserting ads in the [...]

By: Matt Colebourne

Matt Colebourne — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 11:29:10 +0000

Hi Stephanie and all readers.

Not trying to hijack the conversation and happy to continue it here too but I have also posted a short piece on the coComment blog explaining what we’re upto and inviting feedback.

http://blog.cocomment.com/2008/04/07/advertising-revenues-and-harsh-realities/

Bottom line is we don’t want to alienate our users BUT we also need to generate revenues now. All suggestions gratefully received

Best regards,

Matt.

By: Stephanie

Stephanie — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 21:13:21 +0000

Matt: will continue the conversation in a blog post tomorrow. Didn’t get around to doing it today I’m afraid, work got in the way!

By: frederique

frederique — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 14:53:22 +0000

bon, je le fais en francais parce que quand même, je maitrise pas assez bien l’anglais pour grogner dans cette langue là 1. je n’utilise pas cocomment (il me semble important de le préciser), donc mon commentaire sera purement sur l’aspect commercial de l’histoire, et surtout des réponses qu’on t’apporte.
2. Les utilisateurs ne sont JAMAIS unfair. Ils ont toujours raison. Si ils se sentent encore gênés par quelque chose qui s’est produit il y a 9 mois, c’est votre faute puisque le problème est apparu à l’origine. Pas la leur.
3. Arguer d’un “la pub c’est pour financer le service”, en mettant des pubs plus grosses que le service rendu, c’est tout simplement faible. Si le service n’est pas viable gratuitement, alors il fallait le dire dès le début, et c’est que le business plan n’était pas valable. Et il aurait fallu proposer EN MÊME TEMPS l’offre payante sans pub et l’offre gratuite avec pub. Car là, vous imposez la pub.
4. La proposition de discussion en privé est débile. Le problème ne concernait pas que steph.
5. Ben dis-donc, les relations consommateurs chez cocomment, c’est vraiment pourri. Les utilisateurs sont méchants, on fait des modifications sans prévenir l’usager (”we made a minor release yesterday”)
6. Pour en revenir au 1. si jamais j’avais eu la tentation d’utiliser cocomment, cet échange m’en aurait dissuadée.

By: christophe

christophe — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 13:57:46 +0000

Ok, thanks. We have made a minor release yesterday: maybe you experienced this issue just at the same time (but this was very very short). Could also have been a temporary network issue (like I'm having today with the flickr images on this page) slowing down the access to our servers from your computer.

Thanks for your help and if you see anything wrong or have any performance issue again, you are of course welcome to contact me on this post (that I track) or via email.

By: Stephanie

Stephanie — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 12:58:06 +0000

Christophe: feed http://www.cocomment.com/myrss2/steph.rss seems ok now. Yesterday was timing out in WordPress RSS widget and in browser. Was using http://www.cocomment.com/myRss/steph/60a7b0a0430ffc9e6245.rss as provided by comments page. http://cocomment.com/myrss2/steph.rss returns a 301.

By: christophe

christophe — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 12:35:22 +0000

Just tested again from one of our servers in Paris: elapsed time to get your feed is less than 900ms. Could you please send me some details on the way you use the feed ? (tools, ....)

Thanks

By: christophe

christophe — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 12:25:34 +0000

Hi Steph !

On the pure technical side.-( :
I have just tested your conversation feed. I can get it in less than 2 seconds (size is 25K) : not bad considering I’m in Kiev and, for some reasons, (maybe related to the visit of Mr President Bush ), we do currently have a slow access to sites not hosted in Ukraine.
Do you see similar response time ?

Thanks for your help.

By: justgraham

justgraham — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 11:24:04 +0000

I gave up on CoComment a while ago but it still seems to pop up from time to time in the various browsers I use.

By: Matt Colebourne

Matt Colebourne — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 09:42:27 +0000

I think there are two separate issues here so I'll address them each in turn if I may.

Ads in the Feed

coComment is now a much bigger company with over 3 million unique users per month. We have, upto now, provided our services entirely for free and not monetised in any way as we developed our offering and sought to get the right product for our users.

But, now, we need to start monetising since our investors will not continue to pour money in forever without a return.

That means that either we serve advertising or our users pay a small subscription. We are going to implement the latter option so that those who wish to have coComment without ads will be able to do so.

Version 2.0 Beta

I'm a little surprised that this is posted now since it's now 9 months ago and the issues raised there have been resolved. In fact, we posted a candid mea-culpa about the whole issue and emailed our entire userbase to let them know about he problems.

The major issue you mention, in particular, has been fully resolved and coComment will not now block a comment from being submitted even if the coComment server is unavailable.

I'd also suggest you try the new Firefox Sidebar ... it's now no longer a frame and is instead a true browser sub-window. This means faster loading, better control and easy access to coComment on any site where you're commenting.

Summary

Fundamentally, we are committed to listening and responding. Unfortunately, we can't always do everything that we're asked to do but wherever we possibly can, we do.

However, I do think it's a little unfair to raise nine month old issues unless we have clearly not responded to them and, on this, I think we can definitively show that we did so comprehensively.

Fair point ?

Where should we put the ads ?

How many people would prefer to pay a small subscription for coComment and see no ads ?

Would love to get your responses.

By: Stephanie

Stephanie — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 06:32:47 +0000

Kristina: thanks for stopping by. If you don’t mind, I’d rather have the conversation on this blog — why take it into a private space like e-mail or a phone call, where others will not benefit from it? I thought coComment was all about “conversations online”…

I appreciate your desire to be open to discussion and am ready to answer any questions you may have. One simple thing you can do — I guess it’s obvious from my reaction in this post — is clean up the RSS feed and make it more responsive. That would be a good start.

By: Kristina

Kristina — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 00:08:50 +0000

Stephanie - Thanks for the post and I am sorry you fee this way. The coComment team does care and as the company is growing in user numbers and employees, we strive to keep the close connection with our early and devoted users, such as yourself. If you would give me the opportunity, I'd like to connect with you via e-mail or phone and have a conversation to see what we could do. You expressed your opinion pretty well in the blog post, but I think we can also have a conversation about it, which would be extremely helpful. In the past, we have not been perfect, but have always tried to make quick changes responding to the requests and feedback from our users, such as yourself.

Thanks and I look forward to your response ...

Best Kristina kristina@cocomment.com

By: Marie-Aude

Marie-Aude — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 22:24:56 +0000

J’ai arrêté d’utiliser CoComent depuis longtemps, car à chaque fois que je passais sur le site de ma banque avec l’extension activée, mon browser plantait. A force de la désactiver… elle est restée comme cela.
C’est effectivement dommage, c’était une très bonne idée.