BackType

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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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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.

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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.

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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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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.

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