Starting today, BackType supports both Mahalo Answers and Yelp. To claim your answers and reviews, visit the claim comments page. This begins our coverage into two new areas for comment-like data: answers and reviews.
We’ve started to integrate with Facebook Connect so you have the option to:
Today, you can start claiming your comments. We’ll update you on the newsfeed soon.
Don’t forget to vote for BackType in the 2008 Crunchies
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.
Please show your support and vote for us.
To make adding subscriptions easier, we’ve created a little bookmarklet that you can find on your subscriptions page when logged in. You can subscribe to any post’s comments with the Add Subscription bookmarklet. When subscribing, make sure you use the bookmarklet on the post’s permalink page, not the blog’s index; the post URL should be used when adding subscriptions manually.
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:
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:
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.
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.
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
