Sep 1st Feedback from Launch

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

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.

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This entry was posted on Monday, September 1st, 2008 at 2:07 am and is filed under Feedback. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

9 Responses to “Feedback from Launch”

nikolay says:
Sep 1st at 4:07 am

Congrats! You had a great launch with great feedback from the blogosphere! I kinda feel envious!

dp says:
Sep 2nd at 10:43 am

Download Squad sent me here. Signing up and following a few blogs convinced me. But now I have questions, and am thinking there needs to be some discussion. The comment section of your blog seems the right place for that, considering.

So, my first comment is that various features would make the site/service easier to use. Such as: a way of following blogs without knowing the author's name. I've searched on a dozen names, each associated with a specific URL, and succeeded with only four. It would be really helpful if a subscription/follow mechanism were in place for URLs. Even better would be a bookmarklet or context menu item. Then I could follow comments on the Backtype blog!

I also have a comment about site navigation. You've used 'dashboard', which might be more easily understood as 'my dashboard'. Sometimes the meaning of labels like 'home' and 'dashboard' can be misunderstood because other web services use the same labels but which have different functions.

Overall, I'm really looking forward to seeing this develop. It's a much appreciated tool.

Now let's see if this comment gets picked up…

golda says:
Sep 2nd at 3:26 pm

We have blog pages e.g. http://www.backtype.com/blog/www.techcrunch.com but BackType isn't designed to let users follow comments by blog — it lets you follow comments by topic and by author.

We're planning on adding an advanced search page for people (where you will be able to find authors by their URL, in addition to their name).

Thanks for your interest and feedback!

dp says:
Sep 2nd at 6:07 pm

That advanced search page sounds good. Anything to increase the chances of a successful 'follow' sounds good. Have you any other plans for ferreting out comment authors, either on their own sites or elsewhere?

In addition, can you clarify whether certain types of sites are likely prospects? I'm wondering about online news services like the Guardian, which have loads of bloggers, and loads of commenters. Will BackType work with those kind of sites?

Marcio says:
Sep 3rd at 7:34 pm

I really like the service, but the blogs I'm suggesting are not getting indexed. Only my comments on super-mainstream blogs (like techcrunch) are crawled by Backtype. I use the service to have a better control of my comments and replies on blogs, but if only 1% of my comments are retrieved, there's no use. Please expand your crawling domain :)

nikolay says:
Sep 6th at 7:49 am

Expanding the number of crawled blogs will require resources and BackType is an early-stage startup.

golda says:
Sep 6th at 7:55 am

We review all blog suggestions — they are added to the index unless there is a good reason not to. If you let me know which ones we're missing, I'll make sure they get added or let you know why they can't be: support [at] backtype [dot] com

Thanks

Marcio says:
Sep 8th at 2:04 am

Thank you for the reply! Hope you get more resources soon! :)

MatthewBennett says:
Sep 30th at 8:05 am

Hi, really great idea for a service. I arrived from Disqus where my very first question on joining was: “Where's the search box so that I can look for other people, comments and debate in the fields I'm interested in?” I look forward to seeing how you develop it.

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