BackType

BackType is a website that lets people find, follow and share comments from across the web. Comments play an important role in social media; there are millions of comments written every single day. BackType’s technology crawls and indexes millions of comments so you can search them by topic or follow those written by the people you care about.

Summary

• BackType gives comments a home where they can be discovered, followed and shared
• BackType lets you search for comments on a specific topic and follow those written by the people you care about
• On BackType, registered users can aggregate all their comments on their profile and they can follow an aggregation of comments written or shared by the people they’re following
• Blogs and other websites don’t need to install any third party applications or plug-ins and comment authors don’t need to change their behavior
• Listening to and participating with customers in online conversations is important to businesses and brands; over 70 percent of social media conversations occur in comments
• BackType search is great for businesses because they can find comments that mention their industry, products, services, competitors, etc

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Given the recent uproar against Fav.or.it republishing both stories and comments on their service alongside advertisements, we thought it would be a good idea to explain what we’re doing and how it’s different.

Motivation
Our service was created mainly to attribute comments to their authors: to remix comments, not replay them. Comments on BackType are shown in an entirely different context – by topic and by author. We’re trying to boost the incentive to write (good) comments so individuals and businesses can contribute to their reputation and brand, respectively. It’s our belief that conversations should not be fragmented; they should be complements to the original thought or post where they can inspire further dialog – to reward the content creator.

In summary:

1. We don’t (re)publish posts – we link to them
2. We don’t attempt to relocate or divert the conversation
3. We always link back to the comment; in fact, we encourage it so the reader is able to digest the comment in its original context and join the conversation

We are constantly looking for ways to help bloggers and content creators. Feel free to contact us: give us feedback and suggest ways in which we can help build your community and drive traffic to your property.

Welcome to the official BackType blog. BackType is a Y Combinator funded start-up founded by Christopher Golda and Michael Montano. We’ll be using this space to make announcements as well as feature updates.

In the meantime, feel free to subscribe to our blog and follow @backtype on Twitter.