Just like thebeststuffintheworld, Standpedia gives random people with no real claim to expertship except for the fact that they know how to connect to the Internet the ability to leave their opinion on whatever they please.
While this surely is the apex of Internet democracy, I do wonder how long these sites will last.
See, both of them are nicely implemented. Thebeststuff is more like a collection of lists of what people think is the greatest stuff in the world. Well, the name really is quite straightforward. I has all the features of a social network type site, and it’s a fun way to kill time.
Standpedia is a bit more complex, they offer a more or less live discussion of various topics, giving people the option to add their comments and challenge other people’s views. They group these views and comments in a clean organigram-like interface. If I had a screenshot tool at my disposal right now (on Windows, so no KSnapshot), I’d show you, but alas, you’ll have to go there yourself to see.
Now, here’s what I think will happen to these sites. Well, nothing really. They’ll keep being fun places to check out once in a while, but more due to their obscurity than for their inherent value to the opinion seeker. Why? Because you’ve basically got a page that lets everyone add little comments about whatever they please, resulting in messy communication taken totally out of context, with no real information value to it. In the end, these sites will be fun for people who like watching micro-feuds on any kind of issue. Social network voyeurism, if you will.
Commentful
Basically the website helps you keep track of the countless threads, blog comments, Flickr comments and all those other droppings we tend to leave on the web. In contrast to CoComment, which only tracks the conversations you’re actually taking part in, Commentful lets you add anything. Whatever you’re interested in, just use the extension that comes with it (the extension holds your password and username, and is specially made for each user).
You can choose how long you want to keep tracking the conversations when adding them to your account, but you can edit that later on as well. Now, if it weren’t for different ways of invoking the service (right-click menu vs. bookmarklet), Commentful and Co.mments provide virtually the same service.
Commentful has a very similar design to Krun.ch (unsurprisingly), meaning it’s intuitively designed and rather simplistic. The Firefox extension not only adds the right-click functionality, it also adds a “blinker” to the browser, which supposedly tells you once there has been any movement in your conversations (this makes it stand out from Co.mment, so hey, I’ve found a difference). By the way, when clicking the blinker, you’re sent to your tracked conversations on commentful, and I really like the fact that Kailash has been so considerate to actually have the blinker open up the site in a new tab automatically…I can’t tell you how often I’ve cursed myself for opening up pages in my current tab. So, good job.
I don’t know if there’s space for that many comment-tracking services, as it seems to be more of a niche group (RSS seems to cover tracking of just about everything quite well), but Commentful is nicely implemented and works well. Maybe, once there are a few more features added, it could replace Bloglines when it comes to keeping track of my roaming ways.
Another thing about Commentful: apart from the other two comment-tracking services, there seems to be no focus on anything even remotely social. No sharing of conversations, no widgets to add to the sidebar of your blog. I think that’s quite refreshing.