BackType

We’re thrilled to announce that BackType has been acquired by Twitter! We’ll be bringing our team and technology to Twitter’s platform team, where our focus will be developing tools for Twitter’s publisher partners.

Our vision at BackType has always been to help our customers understand the value of engagement on Twitter and other social platforms. We also created BackTweets to help publishers understand the reach of their tweets and content, who they are reaching, and how Tweets covert to web traffic, sales and other KPIs.

Joining Twitter gives us the opportunity to bring insight to tens of millions of publishers around the world that are using Twitter to communicate and connect with their audience. We’re also excited to bring our technology (especially Storm) to Twitter where it can have a big impact across the company.

What happens to BackType?

The BackTweets product will now be offered to current users for free. However, as we begin to focus on our work at Twitter, we will not be accepting any new registrations for BackTweets, and we will discontinue the BackType product and API services.

Our team’s relocating to the Twitter office. We’re very excited to not only join an amazing company that’s changing the world, but to continue building products in pursuit of our shared vision with Twitter.

Finally, I’d like to thank all our investors and advisors, especially Y Combinator, Toni Schneider and True Ventures, Josh Felser and David Samuel from Freestyle Capital, Manu Kumar, Chris Sacca, Raymond Tonsing and Seth Berman.

Follow us on Twitter: @golda, @michaelmontano, @nathanmarz, @bakkdoor

Since we decided to focus exclusively on social analytics less than a year ago, interest in BackType has exploded. Thousands of people use our product every day, thousands have applied for access to our private Beta, and we’ve served billions of API calls and widget impressions. Users of both our product and API love BackType.

However, most of what we have to offer is still behind closed doors. We want to change that, so we recently raised $1MM+ from top tier angel and venture investors to help. The capital will help us grow the team, continue to invest in product development and launch our upcoming paid product later this year; the new investors help provide the insight and experience that will support our growth in 2011 and beyond. At BackType, we’ve built the the most advanced system to analyze social data in the world, and our new product is going to leverage all of that technology.

Meet Our Investors

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BackType is doing better than ever and we’re starting the new year in a new office right in Union Square! We’re growing the team and felt it was extremely important to have an office in a location that’s very accessible to employees (incl. future hires), customers, partners, investors, etc. 2400 square feet of office space with access to public transportation, food (open late), gyms, parking, you name it.

2011 is going to be BackType’s best year yet and we’re hiring!

Identifying influencers is an increasingly important part of social media marketing for companies of all sizes. Today we’re releasing profiles that help you understand the influence of every active Twitter user:

These profiles include a score from 1-100 using a proprietary algorithm similar to Google’s PageRank to indicate how influential a user is. More specifically, the score is based on an examination of a user’s interactions and reach. We’ve also created an influence graph which tells us who you influence and who influences you.

Go ahead and type your @username into the search box on http://www.backtype.com to see your profile. Please send us your feedback.

BackType’s API has become extremely popular over the past year. We consistently serve hundreds of millions of requests to developers, partners and customers. One of the things powered by our API is the BackType Connect WordPress plugin, which has also grown in popularity.

Unfortunately, because of the demanding needs of the plugin (to update conversations in a timely fashion) and limited resources we won’t be able to support it any longer. It sucks to have to kill off awesome products and features we built in the past, but we’re focused on our new product.

Some good news: you can use Disqus for the same functionality, powered by BackType! It’s also possible to recreate the WordPress plugin to work with the API changes we’ve made recently – we really hope there are some developers out there up to the task. How? (more…)

In lieu of recent and upcoming changes to BackType, we’ve decided to retire user profiles – the claiming and user organization of blog comments. It’s a feature we love, but unfortunately does not have a place in the new product. It follows that tweeting comments that make it to your profile will also stop. User profiles will be removed on Wednesday, April 21; we apologize for any inconvenience.

Note: comments will still be aggregated by BackType and accessible through our website; however, users will no longer have the ability to explicitly claim any comments

Today we rolled out a new look for BackType – one that focuses on real-time, conversational search. Although this update mainly relates to the design of the site, we have made some significant changes to search that we’ll continue to improve moving forward.

Until now, BackType has been widely considered a (blog) comment search engine. As you’ll discover, we’re much more than that. We find, archive and connect online conversations from over a million blogs, social networks and other social media in near real-time. That gives us a unique and comprehensive perspective on what topics, web pages and media people are talking about on the web, right now.

BackType is a real-time, conversational search engine. We index and connect online conversations from across the web in real-time, so you can see what people are saying about topics that interest you.

The new BackType will keep you up-to-date on the topics you’re interested in, surfacing reputable opinions and timely commentary happening around the web. We want to deliver the best search results by measuring the amount and quality of conversation surrounding articles, posts and other web pages.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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