May 7th BackType Connect Plugin Feedback

To date, we’ve had well over a thousand downloads of the BackType Connect Wordpress plugin; now we’re starting to gather feedback and ideas for the next release. Here’s a sample of what we’ve been reading:

Over the last few days, we have been fortunate enough to test the plugin out ourselves and can say with all honestly – it rocks. Once installed, you’ll immediately notice comments from services such as Twitter, Digg, Friendfeed and many many more appearing alongside regular comments on your blog.

—Zee, The Next Web

We’re going to continue to strive to connect conversations in near real-time; we thank Zee again for all his help during the final testing of our plugin.

But BackType Connect has some weaknesses that will likely keep larger blogs from using it for now. For one, some of the sources (especially Twitter) can be very spammy. Blog admins can pick and choose which services they’d like to include, but it looks like the filters for services that are enabled need some work [...] There’s also apparently no way to preserve the original comment threads when importing them, which can make some comments appear totally out of context.

—Jason Kincaid, TechCrunch

In addition to our plugin’s support for Akismet and Wordpress’ native comment moderation, we’re going to develop better filters for your sources. Currently we have one: the ability to filter out retweets. Also, we’re going to work to preserve threaded conversations both in BackType and the Connect Wordpress plugin. This was some great feedback; unfortunately, we couldn’t get these features included in our first release.

I get to keep all my comments on my blog and there are no third party sites that my readers must consider, in addition to my other comment features (Facebook Connect, etc.). While I am an early adopter and I cover alot of social web technology, I know my audience enough to know that most are not as tech-savvy and the easier it is for them to engage and comment, the better.

—Maria Reyes-McDavis, Web Success Diva

This is more related to Wordpress’ native comment system rather than our plugin, but it’s nice to know that we can help promote engagement among the less tech-savvy!

See what people are saying about the plugin on Twitter or BackType; we’re looking forward to getting more of your feedback in the comments!

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This entry was posted on Thursday, May 7th, 2009 at 5:09 pm and is filed under Feedback, plugins. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

3 Tweets

14 Responses to “BackType Connect Plugin Feedback”

James says:
May 7th at 5:37 pm

One thing I’ve noticed, is that I’ll occasionally get @ replies to the initial tweet advertising my new blog post. Would it be possible to somehow incorporate these? I’m not sure how good the twitter API is at returning replies to tweets.

Christopher Golda says:
May 7th at 5:41 pm

Twitter definitely doesn’t provide this kind of information; it would be difficult to do it with accuracy ourselves. Would definitely be awesome to have though — we’ll keep thinking about it.

Thanks for your comment

Bill Masson says:
May 21st at 11:13 pm

Wow is all i can say, as soon as i enabled the plugin it started pulling in RE tweets from all over the place. I especially like the comments pulled in from other conversations, ads more spice to the mix.

Keep up the great job, Thanks

Christopher Golda says:
May 21st at 11:44 pm

Thanks, Bill. Glad you’re enjoying it. If you ever have feedback for the next release, let us know.

Mark A. says:
Jun 23rd at 5:19 pm

I replaced the Tweetback plugin with Backtype Connect, because TB didn’t seem to pull all tweets from the Twitterverse. One thing I noticed though is that Backtype Connect (unlike TB) doesn’t separate tweets from regular comments. Is there any guidance on how to modify the comments.php file for that, and perhaps even the css file?

Christopher Golda says:
Jun 23rd at 5:36 pm

Thanks for trying out the plugin. There is an option to separate BackType Connect comments from the native comments on your blog (they are pushed to the end of the comments section). Additionally, if your Wordpress theme’s comments.php uses comment_class, then you can add CSS to style your BackType Connect comments differently.

Feel free to follow up with me via e-mail (chris at backtype) and I’d be happy to help out.

Mark A. says:
Jun 24th at 2:35 pm

Sent you an email.

Jean-Paul Horn says:
Jul 25th at 3:16 pm

I’d love to see all BackType comments even more separated from native WordPress comments, either in a different ol.commentlist or otherwise (like it’s done with trackbacks/pingbacks). They are now part of the normal comment stream and as such I can’t display them in different tabs.

Christopher Golda says:
Jul 30th at 2:35 pm

Thanks for the feedback, Jean-Paul. We’ll try to get that included in the next release

Margolis says:
Aug 2nd at 9:46 am

I’ve just installed BackType Connect on my Wordpress blog, and though I don’t have comments through it yet (I just moved to a new domain) it looks like it has a lot of potential.

One issue, though, that could be useful for me (and probably for some more) – my blog is in Hebrew, so it would be nice if there was a way to customize the texts / links so they would fit to the blog’s language. Will this be possible?

Christopher Golda says:
Aug 2nd at 6:39 pm

Thanks! Let us know if you run into any issues with the plugin — we’re happy to help.

Also, thanks for the feedback. We’re planning to include a field to customize the attribution text in the next release.

Margolis says:
Aug 3rd at 2:49 am

OK, some more questions:

1. When importing comments from twitter, can’t you insert the user’s profile picture from twitter as the comment avatar?

2. It would be useful to have the option not to import my own twitter comments. (As usually I will tweet about my new posts, but it’s rather pointless adding these tweets to the post). That is, specify my own twitter account and have an option to disregard tweets from that account. (Or on that note, have an option to disregard tweets from a list of accounts).

Sophia blomqvist says:
Sep 1st at 2:18 pm

Thanks for a great plugin! It works like a charm.
For the future I would like to suggest including comments from the Notes on Facebook a rich source of comments for me.

Freakenstein says:
Sep 6th at 9:49 am

It’s an awesome plugin, but I second this, would be better to implement:
Margolis says: 2. It would be useful to have the option not to import my own twitter comments. (As usually I will tweet about my new posts, but it’s rather pointless adding these tweets to the post). That is, specify my own twitter account and have an option to disregard tweets from that account. (Or on that note, have an option to disregard tweets from a list of accounts).

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