BackType

Following the introduction of tweets into our real-time search results and the new widget for BackTweets, we’ve extended the BackType API to include more Twitter data. Now you can:

Get tweets that link to a page

Give us the URL; we give you all the tweets that have linked to it whether the links were shortened or not. You’ll be able to retrieve tweets that are months old. The results will follow BackTweets, and are also used for the BackType Connect WordPress plugin.

Get (filtered) tweets that link to a page

This call is the same as the one above, but it filters tweets linking to a URL for quality — perfect if you’d like to display tweets in your application, skipping all the tweets that only contain the page title, etc. This is used for our BackTweets widget.

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Twitter has become an increasingly important part of online conversation, especially to us here at BackType. We’re focused on improving the way you discover news online; not only does news sometimes break on Twitter, but billions of reactions to news are now published in 140 characters or less. However, often the vast majority of reactions were RT-ed or come from Twitter bots; those reactions can be pretty uninteresting, even spam-like.

In pursuit of creating the best search engine for news and opinions, we built technology to discern between the interesting and non-interesting tweets so we can show you the best tweets reacting to news in our search results:

Today, we’re releasing the feature across our website as well as in widget and WordPress plugin forms to help bloggers/publishers deliver the same value to their readers. In fact, the plugin is running right here on this blog underneath each post: it will show you the best reactions from Twitter; if we haven’t found any yet, it lets readers tweet directly from the widget.

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