Co.mments, a service that enables you to track your comments on blogs across the web, is shutting down on January 11. The founder Asaf Arkin put up a blog post last night notifying users.
I have been hungering for strong comment search and utilities for a long time. I was a fan of co.mments because it allowed me to create a comment feed on my blog. This is something that TypePad doesn't offer built in, except on individual posts. (Note - if you subscribe to the comment feed, it will be gone next week.) Backtype is a promising service, but I find it doesn't catch all comments. But it does a fair job.
Overall, I think Friendfeed has the opportunity to soar here. I envision that they will start to integrate more tightly with blog services like Blogger, TypePad and Wordpress, as well as Twitter, Facebook, Backtype and Disqus. Then, conceivably, it can aggregate all blog comments in one place, connect them to your account and make them searchable.
I still hold out that someone will be able to tie all the conversations together and make them searchable. It's painful going to multiple search and aggregation tools to track the conversation. My bet is on Friendfeed.
A big question remains though - how do you monetize aggregated conversation?
