Track your comments part 2- IM Tracking

Here’s the quickie of the idea: InstantMessenger Comment Tracking

Having recently come across the news that Feed Crier (RSS updated via IM) has been acquired by IMified (a lot of things via IM), it sparked an additional thought from my past post on how tracking your blog comments could be appropriately expanded into a service. Before I begin: congrats to them on that :)
By creating something that does a parsed feed (if necessary) of the comments of posts you’ve commented on, IMified (with Feed Crier) would be able to IM you whenever a new comment was added to a post/discussion you’ve taken part in. An additional awesome point would be to allow you to comment to that post through IMified, turning it into IM comments.

[Update 1]
Adam from Feed Crier/IMified was awesome enough to respond to this post. In his comment, he brought up 2 good points:

1. Blog comment spam prevention goes to great lengths to prevent spam… which makes the proposed idea difficult.
2. Users can already use IMified to do a trackback to the post and write a post on their blog in response to the post or comments.

My response: I know that some blogs publish comment feeds. However, and this may already more or less be in place, I was meaning getting a feed only for a post you have commented on, not on all comments being made on all posts from that blog. Eg: You would be notified of my comment here because you commented on this post, and thus are getting a feed for the comments for just this post as it’s one you are actively discussing in.

Shoot. That’s a good point on the spam prevention. I hadn’t considered captcha and its effects.

Trackbacks through IMified could be a solution, yes, but perhaps a bit over the top if you don’t consider your own comment worth an entire post (as is the case for me, commenting quite frequently). While you could take the tag type approach and auto set its category or tag as “Comment response” it would still be something that “pollutes” your blog. On the other hand, it may provide an interesting way for others to see continued thought. The main concern there would be a disconnect between the location of discussions, that is a blog and its comments compared to a blog and others blogs posting comments. Somewhat inconvenient to follow that many trackabcks. This returns us to my “Blogging The Wish” post on improvements either on the feed reader end or in a social network.