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…)

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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WordPress announced the release of version 2.9 “Carmen” today; we’ve updated our WordPress plugins for support. BackType Tweetcount was updated and you’ll need to upgrade to version 2.0 if you’re running WordPress 2.9. BackType Connect did not require an update, so if you’re already running version 0.2.5 you should be fine.

Bitly Pro Support

One of the unique features of our Tweetcount button is its support for custom URL shorteners – we debuted with support for short URLs powered by Awe.sm. Today, we’ve updated Tweetcount to also updated to support Bitly Pro; the button will work with your custom Bitly short URLs. Once you’ve obtained your custom Bitly-powered short URL, visit the BackType Tweetcount options page and enter your API credentials.

Tweetcount now supports: bt.io (default), awe.sm (custom), bit.ly, bit.ly pro, su.pr, digg.com and tinyurl.

Last week, we released a WordPress plugin and widget called Tweetcount:

Tweetcount allows you to display the number of tweets your posts receive, and lets readers retweet the page they’re on.

In addition to supporting awe.sm, Tweetcount now lets you choose from a variety of URL shorteners: Bit.ly, Su.pr, Digg, TinyURL and more! If you set bttc_short_url using javascript or WordPress’ custom fields for the widget and plugin, respectively, you can actually use any pre-shortened URL you like. As mentioned in our initial release, bt.io and awe.sm-powered shorteners will send click data to Google Analytics.

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Today, we added a new offering for publishers: a WordPress plugin and widget called Tweetcount. Tweetcount allows you to display the number of tweets your posts receive, and lets readers retweet the page they’re on. We wanted a button for our blog and decided we’d be happier creating one ourselves. It’s running on this blog in “small” mode.

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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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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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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.

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