We’ve recently introduced a highly requested feature that allows you to auto-subscribe to conversations using BackType Subscriptions. When you enable the auto-subscribe option in your Account Settings, all conversations you participate in will automatically add to your Subscriptions. That means you’ll receive e-mail updates whenever someone follows up with a comment.
Let us know what you think. More updates coming next week 
As part of our announcements on Friday, we released a Twitter-related service called, BackTweets:
Announced alongside BackType Connect today, BackTweets is a fresh new take on a Twitter search engine: It un-shortens and catalogs URLs sent via Twitter. We believe that, even though BackTweets was created to fill a piece of BackType Connect’s total conversation search offering, it will also become an important player by itself and we are glad to see it has gotten its own clean look. —Phil Glockner, ReadWriteWeb
Our initial hope was to gauge interest before including an API; we’ve since received a great response. Some are even calling it the "new Technorati" – not bad for two days work. Today, we put up a simple API for the service; for now, you’ll have to sign up for BackType to get an API key to use.
We’re looking fwd to seeing developers make use of the simple, but powerful functionality of BackTweets!
We’re happy to announce our latest round of funding from True Ventures, led by Toni Schneider in January of this year. We’re extremely fortunate to have a group of people with such a deep understanding of the needs of an early-stage start-up on board with us at BackType, supporting the vision and direction of our company. With their investment, True Ventures join Y Combinator who funded us back in June, 2008. This marks a significant milestone for us; we’d like to thank you (all our users) for helping us get where we are today.
What’s Next
Since we launched in late August, 2008, we’ve been very focused on providing the best tools for publishers and comment authors to find, follow and share comments whether they appear on blogs or any other social media. Not only have we drastically improved our support and scale, we’ve developed lots of new features, most notably BackType Alerts, BackType Subscriptions and the recent BackType Connect. We built these tools to help you participate in the conversations that you’re interested in.
While we were creating BackType Connect, we realized how incredibly valuable all the tweets related to articles and posts that we were surfacing really were. Over a million links are tweeted per day, often obfuscated by URL shorteners with no way for publishers to see who’s talking about their content. It’s a common problem for companies too – we had no idea how many people were tweeting comments from BackType. While BackType Connect already shows tweets (as well as comments from blogs, FriendFeed, Digg, Reddit, and many more), we thought it would be interesting to use our Twitter support exclusively to create BackTweets. Simply put, BackTweets lets you search for links on Twitter.
Today, we launched BackType Connect, a feature that shows you all the conversations surrounding a particular article or post. It connects the "conversational graph," including tweets from Twitter and comments from blogs, FriendFeed, Digg, Reddit and other social media. Bloggers and other publishers can track where people are engaging with their content, and readers can discover active conversations about the topics that interest them.
