Update: looks like alarm:clock jumped the shark gun on this one. coComment CEO Matt Colebourne got back to our e-mail and says rumors about an acquisition are false, and that there will be an announcement about a partnership or some other kind of collaboration between the two startups soon. JS-Kit’s Chris Saad (who is also co-founder of DataPortability and Media 2.0 Workgroup) checked in as well to say there will be an announcement soon, yet declines to share details.

Update 2 with details of the announcement made:

Henceforth, coComment will automatically track comments from all sites enabled with JS-Kit Commenting, on a fully opt-in/out basis, so brand owners can easily follow consumer opinions on more than 600,000 sites. coComment will now offer JS-Kit commenting (and Rating, Reviews and Polls) to sites. coComment and JS-Kit confirmed that all existing users of coComment’s Site Comments engine will continue to be fully supported and will not be inconvenienced.

JS-Kit raised a total of $4.8 million in two rounds, the Series B for $3.6 million dating back less than a month. coComment was backed by even more venture capital: it had raised a total of $5.6 million from Swisscom and the Japanese Netage Capital Partners. This leads us to believe coComment simply ran out of money and chose to merge with a company offering a similar service rather than dying. Alarm:clock adds that coComment’s US employees (their headquarters are in Switzerland) are being offered jobs at JS-Kit or unceremonously fired.

coComment is a service that essentially lets people keep track of all their separate comments and discussions across the web, notifying users of newly posted comments while displaying any comments and conversations that a user may be tracking on sites such as blogs, news, photo sharing, and social bookmarking sites.

JS-Kit’s widget library already includes a commenting system, as well as ratings, polls and reviews, all of which can be embedded on a web page with a short snippet of code. Over the summer, JS-Kit acquired HaloScan, another commenting system, to improve its global profiles and better integrate with blog platforms.

Hence the title of consolidation in the online conversation world. You may remember SezWho acquired a contextual analysis startup called Tejit last May, and Automattic (the company behind WordPress) also made two acquisitions in this space after last summer: Intense Debate and Polldaddy.

Other players include Disqus and Tangler.

The service brings enhancements to blog comments that are not standard features in most blog installations, such as threading, spam filtering, comment/user ratings, and user identities. They’ve also integrated OpenID support through ClickPass. Disqus launched with a host of other commenting services around October of last year. IntenseDebate is a close competitor from a competing incubator, TechStars, as well. SezWho, and CoComment also provide some of the same support.

The overall trajectory of the Disqus and other commenting systems is toward building communities around blogs, similar to MyBlogLog (sold to Yahoo). The idea is to serve as an aggregation point for conversations across multiple blogs so avid commenters can more easily track what’s being talked about. They also want incorporate other feeds such as Facebook and Twitter into user’s profiles. While larger blogs might not like the idea of providing content for another destination site, co-founder Daniel Ha says that the service has already taken hold in verticals such as politics and finance.

The new version includes a stronger emphasis on community and groups, moving away from strictly being a blog conversation tracking tool to one that in centered on topics, in a not dissimilar way to Tangler.

coComment 2.0 expands its sharing capabilities, by providing the ability to join other people in conversations anywhere with just two clicks.

A sidebar browser allows users to navigate, link & discover, and get a complete view of all discussions as they surf the web. A comment anywhere feature allows users to leave comments on any web site via coComment, even if those sites do not allow commenting.

We have 100 free pre-launch passes for TechCrunch readers wanting to check out the new version of coComment. Simply login to the test platform as follows, then register your details.
Link: http://beta.cocomment.com
Platform Username: betatester
Platform Password: cocommentv2

Swiss based coComment has come a long way from an initial product that tracked half a blog conversation (but not a full thread). The company now offers hosted commenting, plugins and various other tracking tools that provide an interesting product. The new release builds on that and is bound to put the company back on the radar for many in the blogging community who may not be using the product, or had previously tried it (like myself) and weren’t all that fussed.

The video below explains the new features in more detail. Previous TechCrunch coverage here.

Most important is that CoComment will now track all comments made after yours – not just comments made by other CoComment users. That was a deal breaker in the past – now the service has made itself truly relevant. Competing service Co.mments has had this feature for some time. New player in the space Commentful does the same thing but appears to offer a simpler feature set for more casual use (30 item tracking limit, blinking notification of every new comment).

Another new feature is called “track this conversation” – enabling you to track comments on blog posts that you haven’t commented on yourself. Still another very cool new feature is the MetaConversation option, which lets you create a comment space tied to a page but off-site in order to leave comments about a page that doesn’t support commenting. Users can now also filter their displays by site type, so you can see just what conversations you’ve joined in blogs, news sites or forums. A number of new sites are supported; the company highlights YouTube as now included in sites you can track conversations on.

All of these point towards CoComment now being a serious player on the web. I know that a lot of people have sworn by it for some time, but until it added the ability to track non-member comments it was hard for me to take seriously. Also, the last time I used the system’s Firefox extension it broke much of my browser’s javascript. That does not appear to be happening this time around, but if important things stop working in your browser and you don’t know why – the first thing I’d do is get rid of CoComment. Hopefully this will no longer be an issue.

Presuming some key problems have been solved, I’m impressed with where this stands.

CoComment allows users to track comments they’ve left on blogs in one centralized place. In effect, CoComment keeps a blog of your distributed comments. They now boast up to 100,000 daily visitors to the site – again, after just a few weeks of being live. For more on cocomment, see my earlier reviews here and here in February.

The company is a project funded by Swisscom Innovations, and all of the founding team originally worked at Swisscom.

Nicolas, Marco and Jan talked about some of the upcoming features they will be launching as well. They have received some recent criticism because users can only track comments from blog posts that they have actually commented on, and only comments left by other cocomment users are shown. New competitor Co.mments, which I wrote about here, goes a step further and allows users to track all comments on any blog post by simply clicking a bookmarket. CoComment says they’ll have similar features very soon. CoComment has other features in the pipeline as well, which will be announced soon.

They support six big blogging platforms currently: Blogger, MSN Spaces, MySpace, TypePad, WordPress and Xanga. I’ve tested this on two wordpress blogs and it works perfectly on that platform. They are working to add additonal platforms, and have requested help from the community.

The process for leaving a comment is fairly simple and does not require using a separate interface. You leave a comment as usual, and before submitting it you simply press the bookmarklet button. This saves the comment at CoComment.

The interface for viewing your comments (image below) is very nice and includes the ability to expand/collapse any set of comments.

And each user has a RSS and Atom feed of comments they’ve left (this is really useful).

While CoComment can do nothing with trackback comments, everything else is rock solid and this is going to be a very popular service.

To use CoComment, a user must install a bookmarklet on their browser and use that bookmarklet, instead of the blog interface, to leave a comment. Users then have a centralized place where all comments are located, and can push that content onto their own blogs with a widget. Commenters are also notified as the conversation continues, so they do not have to continue to go back to the original post. See the “learn more” area of CoComment for more information on this.

It hasn’t launched yet, but Robert Scoble is already impressed.

I may disagree on this one. The idea is great, but I don’t want to have to use a third party service to actually leave the comment. Also, the service does not centralize my trackback comments (comments I choose to leave by posting on my own blog). And I wonder how well it will actually work across all of the various blog platforms.

Nevertheless, the core idea is a great one, and I would very much like to view all of my comments, and other bloggers’ comments, on one centralized page.