Mar 6th BackTweets To Search Links On Twitter

BackTweets
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.

You can perform searches on anything – keywords will match any URL they’re used in, full URLs to track links to articles, blog posts, videos and whatever else you’re interested in. Here’s a search for "nytimes.com" that will show tweets that link to that domain (and notice how Twitter Search would only find one of them):
BackTweets Results
Searching for http://www.youtube.com is a quick and easy way to get a feed of videos that people are tweeting. We also look at what articles and blog posts are popular on twitter throughout the day, so you can see what links are trending to discover new and interesting content.
BackTweets Top Links
Check it out and let us know what you think in the comments or on twitter!

Tags: , ,

This entry was posted on Friday, March 6th, 2009 at 9:10 pm and is filed under Announcement. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

8 Tweets 15 Other Comments

11 Responses to “BackTweets To Search Links On Twitter”

Malcolm Bastien says:
Mar 6th at 10:33 pm

Wow, good job at creating tools that will make things plain and simply, easier for people.

Keep it up!

Matt Singley says:
Mar 7th at 4:27 pm

Fantastic! I love it. Thanks for putting this together.

Adina Levin says:
Mar 7th at 7:48 pm

This is excellent. The next valuable step here is to search for url-shortened links on Facebook, Friendfeed, and other places where people are sharing links.

alex williams says:
Mar 7th at 11:05 pm

Wow! Tremendous twitter tool here!

thruflo says:
Mar 16th at 1:11 pm

Hi,

Great tool, just working on a python wrapper, wanted to ask how the since_id parameter is parsed. The timestamp in the example on the api page (1300588696) seems to me to resolve to the 20th March 2011::

>>> d = datetime.fromtimestamp(1300588696)
>>> d
datetime.datetime(2011, 3, 20, 2, 38, 16)

Yet some manual testing shows me that 1300588696 does works as a timestamp (I get 88 results for http://www.yahoo.com). Can you tell me how you generate / parse / compare the timestamp?

Thanks,

James.

Mike Montano says:
Mar 16th at 2:12 pm

Hey James,

The since_id refers to the Twitter status id of the latest tweet. So this parameter can be used to returns tweets with ids greater than the given id.

thruflo says:
Mar 16th at 3:27 pm

Gotcha; that makes a lot of sense!

Thanks for quick reply :)

James.

film izle says:
Mar 25th at 11:31 am

good news i like that

aaronchua says:
Apr 14th at 7:33 pm

This is really cool.

I foresee many ideas that can be build on this. Do you guys provide an API for other developers to tap into this search capability?

Christopher Golda says:
Apr 14th at 7:45 pm

We have made this available for developers. You can either use the BackTweets API or the BackType Connect API method, though the latter requires a full URL (not just a keyword or domain like with BackTweets)

Additional comments powered by BackType

Twitter Us

    Pages

    Archives

    Categories