BackType

Since our launch in late August, the most requested feature has been the ability to follow comments by post. Today, we’re happy to announce BackType Subscriptions which lets you do exactly that. You give us a URL and we’ll let you know when someone comments via e-mail (immediately or in daily or weekly digests) and RSS.

Using BackType, you can now follow comments by:

1. Author
2. Search Term
3. Post

Let us know what you think!

Over the next couple of weeks, we’re going to roll out some changes to the Dashboard that improve how we display comments written by the authors you’re following. Today, we’ve started grouping recent comments by the story they’re in response to, but we have much more planned:

• If the comment was published using a threaded comment system, show more comments to help you understand the conversation
• Display more context – an excerpt of the post or story the comment is written in response to – and offer more actions
• Group all comments by story (currently comments only group if they are on the same page)

What else would you like to see improved?

Sometimes finding the right people to follow on BackType can be tough – so we threw together a small tool to help. Now you can visit the Recommendations page to retrieve a list of people who we think you might enjoy following. You’ll get recommendations automatically if you’re logged in and have claimed your comments and/or given us your Twitter username; otherwise, you can manually enter a Twitter username to retrieve recommendations.

We’re happy to announce that we’ve extending our support to include Intense Debate enabled blogs as well as comments written on the LiveJournal and Vox publishing platforms. We would really appreciate it if you could help us start adding these newly supported properties by sending us your favorites; make sure you review your claim comments page.

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We’re happy to announce that we now support comments written on Digg and Reddit submissions. You can add your comments to your profile by visiting your Claim Comments page and entering your Digg and Reddit usernames.

Let us know what services you’d like to see included next.

Here’s a quick update with some new tools for BackType Search:

Search Plug-in

Now you can search comments quickly and easily whether you’re on BackType.com or not using our Search Plug-in for Firefox 2+ and Internet Explorer 7.

WebMynd Firefox Extension

BackType Search has been included in the WebMynd Firefox Extension, which allows you to personalize Google search results with the information sources you value most. (more…)

We’ve released another widget that allows you to display search results on your blog or other website. For example, you can show comments that mention your name, company name, products, services and other search terms that interest you and your readers.

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Lots of people have discovered BackType through Twitter; in fact, we have our own account @backtype that we like to use to get feedback and help you out when things go wrong.

So we thought Twitter would be a great place to share the comments you write. Now you can visit your account page to setup auto-posting to Twitter in daily or weekly digests. You can also tweet any comment individually – just click the tweet link beneath the comment.

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Several people have been asking for a way to display their latest comments on their blog, so today we’re releasing two widgets for bloggers and other website owners. Both widgets are stretch-to-fit, designed to fit in the sidebar of a blog. For those who want to change the appearance or contents of our widgets, you can easily do so with a few lines of CSS.

Here are the widgets that are available:

• My Latest Comments (on this blog)
• My Shared Comments

You can see the latest comments made using our official BackType profile in the right hand column of this blog. Visit the widgets page to learn more, or login and learn how you can add widgets to your site with a single line of HTML.

If there’s something else you want for your blog, let us know.

BackType allows you to search keywords across the blogosphere to uncover important conversations that may require our participation, or at the very least, provide you with insight into critical community perspective. — Brian Solis

At BackType, we’ve been thinking of ways to make that easier. Following comments by a particular author a la Twitter was a core feature when we launched, and now you can do the same for search terms.

BackType Alerts lets you follow specific search terms and delivers results to your inbox, feed reader and Dashboard. E-mail updates are available as they happen, or in daily or weekly digests. Use alerts to:

• Monitor your personal and corporate brand and where people are mentioning you, your products and services
• Monitor topics that interest you so you can participate in conversations that are taking place
• Keep up-to-date on your industry and competitors

Create an alert