BackType

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.

We’re always looking for new uses of our API; here are three that have caught our attention:

Bit.ly, a URL shortening service, added comments to the "Conversations" section on their info pages:

In addition to aggregating conversations from Twitter and FriendFeed, the info pages about blog posts show the number of comments found on each post. We use an API provided by backtype.com to pull in the comment count as well as the names of people who’ve commented on each post. You can check this out by visiting the info page for this blog post by Umair Haque: http://bit.ly/info/4AUD68

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BackType Trends is a small web service we launched today that lets you graph mentions of keywords and topics made in millions of comments. We built it to demo our API – which was used exclusively. We’ve featured a group a searches on the front page with a lot of mentions.

For example, here’s a graph of mentions of Obama made in the last two weeks:

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Today we released the first version of our API. We’re going to continue adding new methods and documentation, so we’d love to get your feedback. Hit us up on Twitter @backtype or visit our contact page. If you build an interesting application using our API, let us know so we can check it out!