BackType

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…)

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.

(more…)

This is Part II of How Are Companies Using BackType’s API?

Since we launched BackType Connect, we’ve seen a growing demand for our API. We serve millions of requests every single day through our free (limited to 1,000 daily requests) and commercial API. Here are just some of the companies using our API to do interesting things:

Disqus Comments is a comment system that powers hundreds of thousands of sites. They use BackType’s API to retrieve "social reactions" from across the web to display alongside comments.

Kosmix helps people explore the web by topic, presenting a dashboard of relevent videos, photos, news, commentary and more. They use BackType’s API to retrieve relevant commentary.

(more…)

At BackType, we’re building a new kind of search engine. We index and connect online conversations from across the web, so you can see what people are saying about topics that interest you. In this Python Software Developer position, you’ll be helping us build our relevance and scoring engine, working with large datasets, and helping manage our infrastructure.

If you’re wondering what it’s like to work for a fast growing start-up in Silicon Valley, this is a great opportunity – one we wish we had while we were undergrads at the University of Toronto. You’ll be building real tech, deploying code rapidly, making a significant impact on the company and the millions of people that use our products and services.

We strongly prefer entrepreneurial candidates that are interested in tackling challenging technical problems.

(more…)

We’re looking to hire an ambitious, talented, hard-working developer to join the founding team of two (Michael Montano and Christopher Golda, both engineers) in building the next iteration(s) of our search engine.

We want to build an exceptionally strong engineering team and the first engineer that joins us should reflect that. An ideal candidate would grow into a strong leadership role in the future. This is a full-time position in San Francisco, CA with compensation in both cash and equity.

(more…)

Since we launched BackType Connect, we’ve seen a growing demand for our API. We serve millions of requests every single day through our free (limited to 1,000 daily requests) and commercial API. Here are just some of the companies using our API to do interesting things:

Bitly allows users to shorten, share, and track links (URLs). They use BackType’s API to display related conversations on the Bitly info/statistics pages for URLs.

FiltrBox provides real-time social media monitoring for companies. They use BackType’s API to extend their reach into conversational media, allowing them to deliver even more coverage and quality.

(more…)

Some great news from Hype Machine yesterday: they released a feature called The Twitter Music Chart that lets you view and listen to the most popular Hype Machine songs on Twitter. BackType Connect helps uncover all the Hype Machine songs being shared on Twitter so they can apply their chart rankings, which they detail on their blog. You can even calculate your own Twitter score used in their rankings.

(more…)

In early March, we announced a feature called BackType Connect to let readers and publishers view conversations related to specific content on the web (identified by URL). Today we’re making that functionality available in our API; we’ll be showcasing people that use it here on our blog.

To kick things off, we created a BackType Connect WordPress plugin that we’ll be releasing shortly. It’s running in the comments section right here on our blog, powered by our API. On every post, we pull in comments from other blogs, Twitter, Digg, Reddit, FriendFeed and more and display them inline with our own comments. You can even reply to the comments using WordPress’ native comment system. More on that soon.

As part of our announcements on Friday, we released a Twitter-related service called, BackTweets:

Announced alongside BackType Connect today, BackTweets is a fresh new take on a Twitter search engine: It un-shortens and catalogs URLs sent via Twitter. We believe that, even though BackTweets was created to fill a piece of BackType Connect’s total conversation search offering, it will also become an important player by itself and we are glad to see it has gotten its own clean look. —Phil Glockner, ReadWriteWeb

Our initial hope was to gauge interest before including an API; we’ve since received a great response. Some are even calling it the "new Technorati" – not bad for two days work. Today, we put up a simple API for the service; for now, you’ll have to sign up for BackType to get an API key to use.

We’re looking fwd to seeing developers make use of the simple, but powerful functionality of BackTweets!

Social activity on blogs in total dwarfs social activity on any particular social network. —David Recordon Open Platforms Tech Lead, Six Apart

Commenting is an incredibly ubiquitous social activity; the reason we created an API is so that developers could leverage our growing dataset of comments for other applications.

Using our API, Wesley from Improving The Web recently created a WordPress plugin called My Comments Elsewhere that caught our attention. In his words,

This plugin collects the comments you posted on other people’s websites and lets you display them on your own blog.

(more…)