BackType

Several people have been asking for a way to display their latest comments on their blog, so today we’re releasing two widgets for bloggers and other website owners. Both widgets are stretch-to-fit, designed to fit in the sidebar of a blog. For those who want to change the appearance or contents of our widgets, you can easily do so with a few lines of CSS.

Here are the widgets that are available:

• My Latest Comments (on this blog)
• My Shared Comments

You can see the latest comments made using our official BackType profile in the right hand column of this blog. Visit the widgets page to learn more, or login and learn how you can add widgets to your site with a single line of HTML.

If there’s something else you want for your blog, let us know.

BackType allows you to search keywords across the blogosphere to uncover important conversations that may require our participation, or at the very least, provide you with insight into critical community perspective. — Brian Solis

At BackType, we’ve been thinking of ways to make that easier. Following comments by a particular author a la Twitter was a core feature when we launched, and now you can do the same for search terms.

BackType Alerts lets you follow specific search terms and delivers results to your inbox, feed reader and Dashboard. E-mail updates are available as they happen, or in daily or weekly digests. Use alerts to:

• Monitor your personal and corporate brand and where people are mentioning you, your products and services
• Monitor topics that interest you so you can participate in conversations that are taking place
• Keep up-to-date on your industry and competitors

Create an alert

We’ve been making updates to various parts of the site, so we thought we’d share some of them with you. Let us know what you think:

Claiming Comments

Following our launch, there has been some confusion regarding how BackType works and how to add all your comments to your profile. We’ve updated our FAQ and added a Claim Comments page to make things easier. Additionally, any URL’s comments can be claimed from the right hand side of its profile on BackType.

New Public Timeline

After seeing the highlights on our home page, people were wondering why we didn’t have a list of the latest comments from all of our users. Now we do – check out the comments page for our timeline. The old comments page is still around too; we’re working on improving it.

More Blogs

We’ve been working hard to expand our coverage based on your submissions and help from various partners. If you notice that we’re missing comments from a blog you comment on, please let us know.

We’re going to be releasing some new and exciting features soon. If you want to stay up to date on BackType, follow us on Twitter and FriendFeed.

We’ve received great feedback and lots of interest following our launch. Some of the coverage was featured on Techmeme:

• BackType, A Twitter For Comments
• Five Questions with…BackType Co-Founder Chris Golda

Here are a few things people are saying:

Like Twitter it’s a gold mine of information. I tried searches for TechCrunch50, Obama and Olympics and got back all kinds of content that I would normally miss.

I like this one a lot.

Michael Arrington Editor, TechCrunch – Read full article

BackType is a very promising community that not only allows us to search relevant comments across the blogosphere to uncover important conversations that may require our participation, it also connects us to like-minded thought leaders and the posts that compel them to comment in addition to publishing content on their own blogs.

Brian Solis Principal, FutureWorks – Read full comment

I think BackType has the potential to be as relevant as Technorati (in a good way), Google Blog Search or Summize. It’s one to watch for sure.

Louis Gray Blogger, Early Adopter – Read full comment

I think it has a lot of long-term potential. What I like most about it is that I feel myself wanting to go out there and start commenting more on blogs …

Gary Vaynerchuk Social Media Sommelier – Watch video

Since the launch, we’ve been making various fixes and improvements around the site. If you have any feedback, let us know – we’d love to hear from you.

Finally, we’d like to thank our beta users for all the feedback and helping us work out early bugs in the service. Stay tuned for new features and announcements.