BackType

At BackType, we’re constantly experimenting and prototyping – to help us explore new ideas, learn and have fun. BackType Labs is another place for us to show you some of the stuff we’re working on.

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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

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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!

BackType has been nominated in the 2008 Crunchies for "Best Bootstrapped Startup":

Voting will continue until end of day on January 5, and the winners will be announced at the award ceremony and party on Friday, January 9 at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco. We released another 200 tickets for the event this evening as well, get them at Amiando.

We’ve been making updates to various parts of the site, so we thought we’d share some of them with you. Let us know what you think:

Claiming Comments

Following our launch, there has been some confusion regarding how BackType works and how to add all your comments to your profile. We’ve updated our FAQ and added a Claim Comments page to make things easier. Additionally, any URL’s comments can be claimed from the right hand side of its profile on BackType.

New Public Timeline

After seeing the highlights on our home page, people were wondering why we didn’t have a list of the latest comments from all of our users. Now we do – check out the comments page for our timeline. The old comments page is still around too; we’re working on improving it.

More Blogs

We’ve been working hard to expand our coverage based on your submissions and help from various partners. If you notice that we’re missing comments from a blog you comment on, please let us know.

We’re going to be releasing some new and exciting features soon. If you want to stay up to date on BackType, follow us on Twitter and FriendFeed.

We’ve received great feedback and lots of interest following our launch. Some of the coverage was featured on Techmeme:

• BackType, A Twitter For Comments
• Five Questions with…BackType Co-Founder Chris Golda

Here are a few things people are saying:

Like Twitter it’s a gold mine of information. I tried searches for TechCrunch50, Obama and Olympics and got back all kinds of content that I would normally miss.

I like this one a lot.

Michael Arrington Editor, TechCrunch – Read full article

BackType is a very promising community that not only allows us to search relevant comments across the blogosphere to uncover important conversations that may require our participation, it also connects us to like-minded thought leaders and the posts that compel them to comment in addition to publishing content on their own blogs.

Brian Solis Principal, FutureWorks – Read full comment

I think BackType has the potential to be as relevant as Technorati (in a good way), Google Blog Search or Summize. It’s one to watch for sure.

Louis Gray Blogger, Early Adopter – Read full comment

I think it has a lot of long-term potential. What I like most about it is that I feel myself wanting to go out there and start commenting more on blogs …

Gary Vaynerchuk Social Media Sommelier – Watch video

Since the launch, we’ve been making various fixes and improvements around the site. If you have any feedback, let us know – we’d love to hear from you.

Finally, we’d like to thank our beta users for all the feedback and helping us work out early bugs in the service. Stay tuned for new features and announcements.

Given the recent uproar against Fav.or.it republishing both stories and comments on their service alongside advertisements, we thought it would be a good idea to explain what we’re doing and how it’s different.

Motivation
Our service was created mainly to attribute comments to their authors: to remix comments, not replay them. Comments on BackType are shown in an entirely different context – by topic and by author. We’re trying to boost the incentive to write (good) comments so individuals and businesses can contribute to their reputation and brand, respectively. It’s our belief that conversations should not be fragmented; they should be complements to the original thought or post where they can inspire further dialog – to reward the content creator.

In summary:

1. We don’t (re)publish posts – we link to them
2. We don’t attempt to relocate or divert the conversation
3. We always link back to the comment; in fact, we encourage it so the reader is able to digest the comment in its original context and join the conversation

We are constantly looking for ways to help bloggers and content creators. Feel free to contact us: give us feedback and suggest ways in which we can help build your community and drive traffic to your property.