Scoble points us to a cool new website called coComment; it makes so much sense! I thought I was the only idiot wandering around blogs, posting comments and then having to manually go back and see if there was a response. Apparently not…

coComment is a new (beta) service to track your comments on other blogs. I installed a little bookmarklet and tested it out earlier today. What you do is type in your comment on someone’s website, click the ‘coComment’ bookmarklet then hit submit. It will then track your comment and any subsequent replies. Unfortunately only Blogger, MSN Spaces, myspace, Typepad, WordPress and Xanga blogs are supported.

..and yes, it is in beta so theres some things to be worked on. The FAQ says that soon you’ll be able to “integrate cocomment in your comment form so all comments are entered into Your Conversations page”. It’ll be pretty easy to make a WordPress plugin for this and once this process is automated I’ll be in heaven. Now that I think about this, the process of clicking a bookmarklet everytime I make a comment seems a bit absurd. Thank goodness Brian has already created a Greasemonkey script.

But… why can’t Technorati or somebody else just scan blog comments and look for people who put in the same name/URL combination?

In any case, I like the ‘Blog box’. Essentially you can put a box on your site that shows your visitors where you’ve been commenting lately (because it’ll obviously be more insight and another look at our genius musings around the web).

Okay, I know I have a problem, but I was ‘poking’ around on Facebook today (pun intended) and I usually click around and see if I can find anything new. It’s kinda hard to find out if there’s a change anywhere becuase Facebook doesn’t have a blog or anything (ahem, Noah?) but that’s okay, I clicked on ‘My Privacy’ today and bam!, it’s different. I refreshed the home page like 20 times and haven’t seen any mention on the ‘Next Step’ either.

I hated this page because it was like, 2047 check boxes with 32 different radio buttons to select. But now it’s narrowed our privacy settings down to ‘Normal’, ‘Reserved’, ‘Paranoid’ or a custom mixture of options.

This seems like one of those little things, but for some it’s kinda a big deal. With a lot more people jumping on the site now (alumni, staff, even parents!) it’d be nice to make sure you can be as open as you want without the whole world knowing about you.

It also looks like you don’t need to know a person’s email address if you want to block them anymore. It’ll do a search for you and let you select them to be blocked. This is much simpler and almost one of those no-brainers… it’s about time.

Also, for those who aren’t yet married yet but are planning on it, it looks like ‘Engaged’ has been added to the relationship status. Very exciting! I’m sure this applies to plenty of people. I already added a girl friend of mine as ‘Engaged’.

Since she already accepted it I don’t think I need to buy a ring…

?Meh.?

But seriously, if I had known this was coming I would have spent the extra 2 seconds (times 300 friends) to go through and append the ?date? that I met everyone. Now all that time spent has been almost for no reason. On the good side, I was able to filter out like 10-20 people that I didn?t really have as friends.

Now this new feature requires me to go back and add the date to each person. In my honest opinion, Facebook should do a little bit of math to figure out when high/middle/elementary school was for me. That way I don?t have to go through dozens of contacts and add the years. You guys already know I graduated from Lakewood High School in ?04. Let?s put all those ?high school friends? somewhere near 2004?

Also, why does it assume that when I put ?met in an organization? that it was in the past? We?re still in that organization. So, unless I put a year in (the past) how about you a) assume it was this year and b) put ?You and ____ are (not were) members of _____??

The idea is pretty neat but right now it all seems a bit? cluttered. Since I have so many friends from only one or two years can we make it an iframe or something? Something that I could scroll if wanted but it?s so obnoxious. Perhaps making a ?wall? of friends above the categorization of them? That would look a bit neater I think. You could easily quadruple the number of people on each line then (thus saving precious scrolling time).

Can we start adding previous classes to this timeline? Like a new page on our profile to put all semesters of college? Then maybe it can start highlighting people that were simultaniously in those classes? This way I don?t have to manually think about who did what with me. They can add it to their own profile and then Facebook will do the dirty match-up work. Come on, make it easier for me, please? Plus, I feel I could start to trend how I met people (friends of friends from class last semester, etc). Can our current previous jobs and activites be included in this timeline profile (for the same reasons)? That way I don?t even have to pick a year (mentioned two paragraphs ago), Facebook figures it out for me, again.
Also, can you announce this to people the same way you announced the high school version of Facebook? (A message at the top to be ?hidden?) People will not find this very easily. In fact, I showed a few people today and they admitted they would never have noticed it in the first place.

Okay, thats enough stream of consciousness for now.