Commentful Tracks Comments on Digg, YouTube, Blogs and More
Commentful is a new service that helps you track comments on Digg stories, YouTube videos, blog entries, MySpace pages and Flickr photos - in fact, virtually anywhere with a comments field. You just create an account and add the URLs you want to track to your watchlist.
Context & Ripple Effects
Comment tracking became a category in February 2006, when coComment launched to follow conversations you had joined in blog comments (Solution Watch's early review), with Microsoft's geek blogger and Om Malik's Dabble noting the same itch around the same time. Five months later, Commentful arrives as the second serious entrant.
What distinguishes Commentful is scope: rather than blogs alone, its watchlists cover Digg stories, YouTube videos, MySpace pages and Flickr photos — any URL with a comments field. That breadth tracks where 2006's conversation actually lives, on platforms like [[related:MySpace]] and Digg that had spent the first half of the year absorbing mainstream traffic.
First-order effects
- Users who comment across multiple sites get a single watchlist instead of revisiting each thread manually, directly competing with coComment's blog-centric tracker.
- coComment faces a rival whose coverage of Digg, YouTube and MySpace exceeds its own, forcing a product-scope response in a category only five months old.
Second-order effects
- Tracking services that scrape or read comment fields put quiet pressure on Digg, YouTube, Flickr and MySpace to expose cleaner comment feeds and APIs — the aggregators are only as good as what platforms permit them to read.
- If watchlists prove sticky, they position whoever owns the tracking layer to become the cross-site identity and notification hub, shifting power slightly away from the individual platforms' own inbox systems.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward comments being treated as portable data rather than page furniture — a structural shift that would favor third-party comment layers and standards over per-site silos, though whether platforms tolerate that remains genuinely unresolved at mid-2006.
The trend: As online conversation fragments across social platforms beyond the blogosphere, a tooling layer of cross-site comment trackers and aggregators is emerging to reassemble it.