Apr 8th BackType Connect for Wordpress

For those looking for our Tweetcount plugin, click here

Following our API update last week, today we’re releasing the BackType Connect Plugin for Wordpress. It brings the functionality of BackType Connect to the Wordpress comment system, showing conversations from other blogs, Twitter, FriendFeed, Digg, Reddit and more inline with the comments on your blog. Existing conversations about your content taking place across the web can now be displayed right on your blog for your visitors to read and respond to.

Click here for for installation instructions and a link to download.

Features

  • Specify which sources you want to include comments from
  • Add a summary to the top of your comments section, which shows the number of comments from each source
  • Specify whether you would like BackType Connect comments to be displayed at the end of the comments section, or mixed with the rest of your comments
  • The plugin works on top of your existing Wordpress comments, both threaded and non-threaded, and can work with other comment-related plugins

Sources

We import conversations from the following sources:

  • Other Blogs – whenever someone comments on a post that links to one of yours
  • Twitter – whenever someone tweets one of your posts
  • FriendFeed – whenever someone comments on an entry for one of your posts
  • Digg – whenever someone comments on a submission for one of your posts
  • Reddit – whenever someone comments on a submission for one of your posts
  • Hacker News – whenever someone comments on a submission for one of your posts
  • And more

Let us know what you think – we’re gathering feedback for the next release.

Special thanks to Wesley from ImprovingTheWeb and Zee from WeDoCreative!

Tags: , ,

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 8th, 2009 at 1:03 pm and is filed under Announcement, plugins. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

20 Tweets 25 Comments 7 Other Comments

74 Responses to “BackType Connect for Wordpress”

konsl says:
Apr 8th at 1:15 pm

The plugin works with Hacker News comments too – this conversation will be mirrored on our blogMore info:http://www.backtype.com/plugins/connect

This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

Wayne Sutton says:
Apr 8th at 1:51 pm

Nice: I’m going to install this on a few sites and see if it adds comment value to the site.

Thanks

Michael Montano says:
Apr 8th at 2:03 pm

Great — make sure to let us know what you think!

Brad says:
Apr 8th at 1:59 pm

When’s Drupal support coming?

Christopher Golda says:
Apr 8th at 4:03 pm

We’re definitely interested in supporting all publishing platforms, but we’ll probably look at other blog-specific ones first.

Thanks for your interest

Jonathan Bloom says:
Apr 9th at 10:54 pm

Drupal IS blog focused. Every piece of content,no matter if it’s a blog or not, can have a comment associated with it.

bemmu says:
Apr 8th at 1:59 pm

Is there a Firefox plugin so I could see conversations about whatever page I happen to be browsing now?

This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

omakase says:
Apr 8th at 2:09 pm

No, but I really want that to. We have a bookmarklet that is sort of similar, but not quite there. I know of one tool being built with our API, that will be released soon that solves this problem. We’ll mention it on our blog when it comes out.

This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

Andy Brudtkuhl says:
Apr 8th at 2:12 pm

How is this different / like Disqus integration?

Christopher Golda says:
Apr 8th at 2:27 pm

Fundamentally, I think the two are the same, but I’ll explain how the integration is different.

Our plugin works with the native Wordpress comment system. That means that you are free to use other comment-related plugins like commentluv, etc.

We prefer to display comments from other blogs, Twitter, FriendFeed, Digg, etc as comments, not pingbacks. We let you mix them with your own comments, reply to them, etc.

Lastly, Disqus’ integration is powered by a different service, so you’ll notice that the results differ. You can compare by entering a post into BackType Connect:
http://www.backtype.com/connect

Hope that helps.

amouat says:
Apr 8th at 2:34 pm

Hmm, context seems to be a problem. Perhaps all the hacker news comments should be grouped together?

This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

dmix says:
Apr 8th at 2:42 pm

Will I have to uninstall Disqus to get this work? Is there a way to migrate to BackType’s connect or combine the two?

This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

halo says:
Apr 8th at 2:44 pm

So you’re taking content written on other sites, scraping it without permission of the original authors or site owners, and reproducing wholesale on your site? This is unethical at best and outright illegal at worst.

This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

konsl says:
Apr 8th at 2:45 pm

Unfortunately they don’t work together. If you use our plugin with Disqus enabled, it will just show the "Summary" of activity above the comment section.Disqus has their own "Social Media Comments" you might want to look into.

This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

wesley says:
Apr 8th at 2:57 pm

Backtype obeys robots.txt rules. That said, the value a system like this adds outweighs the cons for me.

This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

wesley says:
Apr 8th at 2:58 pm

I agree on grouping the comments independently. That’s easy to add and should hopefully be in version 0.2.But it will probably require some manual template editing.

This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

konsl says:
Apr 8th at 2:58 pm

I’d agree that sometimes the comments don’t work – that’s why we let you control which sources you want to display.Regarding replies to comments: I’m not too concerned. People who write entire articles often don’t see the responding conversation that happens on Hacker News. Conversations are fragmenting. Lots of people use plugins to pull in tweets and FriendFeed comments, so we thought we could give them all in one.

Regarding grouping: We have an option to push all the comments to the end of the comment section, but we don’t group them distinctly right now. We want to do that in our next release.

Thanks for the feedback!

This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

halo says:
Apr 8th at 3:14 pm

So what? A lack of a robots.txt rule doesn’t imply "I can take other people’s content, reproduce it wholesale, remove it from context, and put it on other people’s sites or otherwise do what I want to it" does it? A lack of a robots.txt rule doesn’t imply "I can ignore copyright law" does it? A lack of a robots.txt rule doesn’t imply that the /author/ of the stolen content, perhaps with some suggestion of an implicit endorsement, wants it shown on some random 3rd party site does it?I’m sorry for being so old fashioned as believing in the simple concept that when I comment on site A it doesn’t mean I automatically want it reproduced in full on site B, C, D and E. I’m sorry for being so old fashioned in believing that as the author it removes value from /my work/. I’m sorry for being so old fashioned for complaining when these "advantages" aren’t "advantages" for me but rather some 3rd party company or blog who are trying to profit from my work instead, perhaps even suggesting some implied endorsement, and being so old fashioned to /dare/ raise an objection when they try and do so.

Sorry for being so old fashioned that thinking that any company that is based around the concept of taking other people’s content and reproducing it wholesale without considering the wishes of the copyright owners or authors is fundamentally flawed as a business and raises many dubious ethical and legal questions.

Or, perhaps, I should put my objections in a more concise manner that you’ll understand. How can I, as an author, do this:

User-agent: * Disallow-Author: HaloOr, perhaps the bigger bolder question I want answered is /why/ should I have to do that, and what makes you believe you have the right to take my rights away from me?Oh, and your site doesn’t seem to support people who edit comments correctly.

This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

Dr. Paul Coates says:
Apr 25th at 10:43 am

CLAT Guru is absolutely right, if you publicly comment about my blog post, I have every right to reproduce your comment in relation to that blog post.

By Law, the ORIGINAL source attribution goes back to the article being commented on, not the comment. The blog author has every right to republish public comments.

reconbot says:
Apr 8th at 3:59 pm

As an author of articles I can say I get annoyed that all the comments from my readers (I do this socially not professionally – so mainly my friends) are stuck in facebook, google reader or twitter and not on my site. These big apps by go away but I’ve had my "blog" for almost 10 years, I’d rather be in control or have a copy of the discussion.

This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

jeremyawon says:
Apr 8th at 5:06 pm

is there any way to prevent someone from doing this besides appealing to their ethical sensibilities? i suspect intuitions about "my rights" in cases like this are rooted in a zero-sum-economy psychology which just won’t translate to the internet.

This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

rantfoil says:
Apr 8th at 5:20 pm

Do you dislike being indexed by Google as well?

This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

halo says:
Apr 8th at 5:46 pm

Does Google scrape content in whole, separate them from the original page and reuse them on other people’s commercial websites without my permission? Y’know, the same difference between Google and a website that steals articles from other sites and reproduces them in whole for ad revenue, which is exactly what this site does but because ‘it’s comments’ it’s suddenly magically considered okay?

This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

fallentimes says:
Apr 8th at 6:01 pm

But isn’t that up to the blog/site owner whether or not they want to be included in Backtype? And if the users don’t like it one way or the other they can choose to go elsewhere.I guess I’ve never viewed my comments on other people’s sites with such strong ownership.

This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

halo says:
Apr 8th at 6:36 pm

It is up to the owner (and their terms and conditions, natch). But it should be opt-in, the same way any other sort of permissive content licensing is explicitly opt-in, and the same way it’s bad form to take content that isn’t permissively licensed and reuse it on other sites without explicit permission. There’s no reason why taking comment content should be treated differently from taking article content.Hijacking other people’s content without permission should not be considered a business model.

This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

halo says:
Apr 8th at 6:36 pm

It is up to the owner (and their terms and conditions, natch). But it should be opt-in, the same way any other sort of permissive content licensing is explicitly opt-in, and the same way it’s bad form to take content that isn’t permissively licensed and reuse it on other sites without explicit permission. There’s no reason why taking comment content should be treated differently from taking article content.Hijacking other people’s content without permission should not be considered a business model.

And for all the people who have modded me down, why? Explain the flaw in my logic, or is it a case of "Well, I like it and he doesn’t so I’ll mod him down"?

This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

akkartik says:
Apr 8th at 7:01 pm

Welcome to the internet. Are you at the mercy of others? Yep. Is this legally dubious? Sure. Is everybody syndicating and remixing away? Hell yeah. Welcome to a world where you can pay for the privilege of being copied, just so your name spreads more widely. http://akkartik.name/blog/2009-03-26-03-16-33-socI’m reminded of websites that don’t want others to link to them. Or of the losing battle of the RIAA. You can waste your breath fighting it. Or you can focus on how to keep people listening to you.

This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

philwelch says:
Apr 8th at 8:30 pm

It would also be nice if tree-structured discussions (like HN) were reflected instead of just hacked apart into serial structures. Grouping together HN comments without the tree structure would be far less useful than respecting tree-structured discussions but intermixing trees from different sites.

This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

philwelch says:
Apr 8th at 8:30 pm

It would also be nice if tree-structured discussions (like HN) were preserved instead of just hacked apart into series of seemingly unrelated comments. Grouping together HN comments without the tree structure would be far less useful than respecting tree-structured discussions but intermixing trees from different sites.

This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

omakase says:
Apr 8th at 9:14 pm

Fully agree. Threading is high on our list.

This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

Rose Clark says:
Apr 8th at 10:49 pm

Thank you! Easy to install.

Marco Raaphorst says:
Apr 9th at 5:25 am

sorting is absolutely incorrect. maybe because I am in Dutch timezone, but sorting is major issue. disabled the plugin.

Marco Raaphorst says:
Apr 9th at 5:27 am

sorry my mistake, should have choose ‘mixed’ of course. wonderful! :-)

Christopher Golda says:
Apr 9th at 5:32 am

No worries; glad you sorted it out!

Toni @ NavinoT says:
Apr 9th at 5:48 am

bang.. this plugin import comments from my posts into anothers! Doh, any tips to clean it up?

Toni @ NavinoT says:
Apr 9th at 5:51 am

Apparently this plugin is not compatible with fbconnect plugin which always set user url to current blog url.

For those have FBConnect plugin (mine was from social.es installed), be prepared!

Michael Montano says:
Apr 9th at 5:52 am

You can remove comments from the regular wordpress comments dashboard. There’s also a setting on the BackType Connect settings page to exclude comments made on your own posts. Did you try that?

wesley says:
Apr 9th at 11:43 am

It’s alive! http://convotrack.com

This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

Karl Foxley says:
Apr 9th at 12:13 pm

This seems to be a really good plugin. I will be giving it a test drive on my ‘test blog’ to see how well it works before using it on one of my main blogs.

Thank you for the information.

Karl

Michael Montano says:
Apr 9th at 12:27 pm

Thanks Karl, let us know how it goes.

Frank says:
Apr 9th at 5:45 pm

I get an error when I enter comments overview in my WordPress 2.7.1 blog (shared hosting)

Fatal error: Only variables can be passed by reference in /www/htdocs/[full path]/wp-content/plugins/backtype-connect/backtype-connect.php on line 309

Although it says there are two unapproved comments, it only shows this message (once).

See here: http://img6.imageshack.us/img6/4634/backtypeerror.jpg

Any idea?

Christopher Golda says:
Apr 9th at 5:58 pm

We’re investigating this now; I’ll e-mail you when we have a solution.

Thanks for letting us know and sorry for the inconvenience

Christopher Golda says:
Apr 10th at 11:11 am

This has since been resolved.

Money Ideas says:
Apr 16th at 3:26 pm

Great plugin guys!

Thomas Waters says:
Apr 30th at 8:39 pm

Added the plugin to my WordPress blog and it seems to be working nicelypulling stuff from twitter. I would like the ability however to screen out my own twitter account. Maybe in a way similar to setting mail filters, where you can add various addresses/locations to ignore?

Michael Montano says:
Apr 30th at 9:08 pm

This is great feedback Thomas. So far the number one feature request we’ve had are more advanced filters (especially for tweets). The next release will definitely be addressing these issues. Please let us know if you have any other suggestions :)

Edwin says:
May 10th at 2:47 pm

Just installed it on my blog. Going to play a bit with it.

Perian says:
May 11th at 11:17 am

Love the plugin – it worked beautifully when I first installed it last week. Since that first push, though, it’s not updating at all. I keep changing and resaving settings to see if it might “jog” the plugin, but nada.

Any idea what might be wrong?

Mike Montano says:
May 11th at 5:12 pm

It seems to be working fine on your latest post: http://magnes.org/opensourceblog/?p=337

Can you point me to the problem?

charles palma says:
May 14th at 12:39 pm

Is this comment system where i am writing now is the implementation? This is good. Maybe you could add it on the most popular blogging platform called: “Blogger”.

Simos says:
May 24th at 7:49 am

Great job! we need that in blogger too!!

cadouri says:
May 31st at 12:44 pm

Is that plugin working with oldest versions of wordpress?
I`m using WordPress 2.6.1
Thanks.

Mike Montano says:
May 31st at 12:52 pm

The plugin is known to work on older versions (including 2.6), though it has not been fully tested on those versions. I have run it on 2.6 myself without issue. If you run into any issues please let me know.

DanGarion says:
Jul 10th at 6:16 pm

I’ve had this installed for about 2 weeks and it appears that after the initial import it didn’t pull any more comments from Backtype after that.

I reset it just a couple minutes ago and will see if it doesn’t do anything again. What function is it using to pull new comments daily?

Also I had set it up to do the weekly digest, when does it do the digest? It didn’t do one after 2 weeks either, when I had it set to weekly.

Thanks for the assistance.

Mike Montano says:
Jul 10th at 6:25 pm

Hi Dan,

I believe you’re referring to the My Comments Elsewhere plugin and not BackType Connect. We did not develop the MCE plugin. Some changes were made on our end a little while ago that may have affected it. If you’re comfortable editing the source I can help you find the fix, it may require also removing the comments that had previously been imported. Let me know, you can email me at support [at] backtype [dot] com

Stephen Mack says:
Jul 26th at 12:56 am

Just installed this plug-in on my WordPress 2.8.1 blog. It seems to do a great job for almost all of my posts, but for some reason, it hasn’t found the comments on FriendFeed for my two most recent posts, even though the URL is the same and there is a bit of discussion about them. Any ideas?

Maxime says:
Jul 28th at 4:13 am

Same problem … :(

Christopher Golda says:
Jul 30th at 2:24 pm

Please point me to the URLs you’re referring to and we’ll look into it for you.

hispanicLA says:
Jul 27th at 12:58 pm

I like and use the plugin. Will you expand the list of services beyond digg, facebook, etc.? Can it be done manually by the user? For example, I’d like to have the comments on my posts in meneame.net included.

Nicole Simon says:
Jul 29th at 3:57 pm

- please make it a special type so the imports from here etc can be separated
- allow for a different string of “originally posted …” in order to allow translation w/o having to mingle in the source cocde
- tweets with @ should also be linked, as well as hashtags back to twitetr search

Christopher Golda says:
Jul 30th at 2:24 pm

Thanks for the feedback! We’ll do our best to include your suggestions in the next release

Scott Aniol says:
Aug 5th at 9:49 am

It would be nice if there were an option to NOT post my own tweets. I have my blog posts automatically sent to my twitter account, so then that tweet is automatically sent back as a comment on the post with BackType Connect. It’s kind of redundant.

I’d like to be able to tell BackType Connect to not post comments from my own Twitter account.

Christopher Golda says:
Aug 5th at 12:10 pm

We’re going to be adding more filters in the next release. Thanks for your feedback!

Margolis says:
Aug 7th at 3:49 pm

Hi,

I have BackType installed on my blog. Very nice. My blog is in Hebrew, so it’s a right-to-left theme. There are some issues with BackType formatting (not to mention the option to translate the texts). (I’ve already posted about the translation issue in another post).
Specifically, the top links specifying the number of comments get mixed up in RTL. Take a look at this capture – http://zarim.net/images/backtype.jpg
It looks like it says “Tweets 4 Other Comments 2″ but actually the “2″ is part of the Tweets link and the “4″ is for the comments.

Ami says:
Oct 31st at 1:01 pm

hello! i installed the plugin with no problem on my test site, but tweets aren’t coming in. :( if i go to backtype and search for it, the tweet appears, but it hasn’t yet imported into my comments.

does it matter if the blog isn’t indexed by google? or, is there anything special i need to add to my comments template? otherwise, thoughts on why it would not show up?

thanks!

Ami says:
Nov 1st at 8:12 pm

just wanted to say tweets took a couple of hours but they are there now! great plugin!

Christopher Golda says:
Nov 1st at 8:17 pm

Great to hear; sorry we didn’t get back to you sooner!

Ami says:
Nov 2nd at 11:27 am

no problem. :) question for now or maybe feedback for the future? i have tweets that immediately show up on backtype connect but aren’t importing in (or at least, not yet, even though tweets on older posts seem to be coming in fine). it would be great if we could adjust the import time settings – ie set how fast we would like backtype to check for tweets (or, if there is a good way to edit the source code to do this now that would be awesome).

example of post that isn’t old but tweets haven’t imported: http://www.backtype.com/connect/www.elizabethannedesigns.com%252fblog%252f2009%252f10%252f29%252fessential-questions-for-your-photographer%252f

thanks again!

Ami says:
Nov 2nd at 11:59 pm

i hope this is my last comment (sorry). i don’t have comments enabled on backtype connect (only tweets) but btc is still populating my database table with them, giving them an approved status of d_1 and a comment_agent of btc_blog. it’s kind of strange, as now if i go to my wordpress dashboard, i see x# of comments and y# approved, but 0 spam (these should equal).

obviously i can go in and delete those rows in the database but it’d be nice if they didn’t populate at all.

also, tweets that are deleted after import remain, but this perhaps makes more sense as you’re telling it not to import them again?

thanks! :)

Jay says:
Nov 28th at 10:51 pm

Hi Christopher,
Just want to let you know my feedback, even if it’s late :-)
The plugin is really great but I would love to be able to disable a chosen twitter user, i.e., me ! I explain myself : On my blog, as soon as I post a new note, there is an automatic twitter update with a link to my note. So in the minute, Backtype is importing that tweet into my comments. For every note, it’s the same. First comment on each post is my tweet. It’s pretty annoying :s

Thanks for reading

Christopher Golda says:
Jan 5th at 8:05 pm

We’re addressing this in our next release. Thanks for your patience

Amanda French says:
Jan 5th at 6:28 pm

Just want to say I love this plugin — it does exactly what I wanted it to do. The import worked beautifully. Gorgeous! So much of the conversation about a blog post now takes place in places other than on the blog itself; it’s really great to be able to show those conversations on my blog.

Also, if you’re taking feature requests, I’d like a trackback counter in the comments summary. On this post of mine, for instance, there are 61 responses, 53 of which are from Twitter & 3 of which are from “Other Sites” (actually they’re comments on my own blog) — the 5 trackbacks don’t show up: http://amandafrench.net/2009/12/30/make-10-louder/

Of course, now I’ve added another trackback, so that’ll be trackbacks that don’t show up in the summary. :)

Christopher Golda says:
Jan 5th at 8:04 pm

Thanks! We should be updating the plugin soon with a key new feature, so stay tuned :)

Appreciate the feedback as well

Additional comments powered by BackType

Twitter Us

    Pages

    Archives

    Categories