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.
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.
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
Today, we’re happy to announce our partnership with Filtrbox to help them extend their online conversation monitoring solutions for market intelligence.
Filtrbox G2 delivers critical market intelligence to executives, sales professionals, investors and marketers. The service acts as an intelligent agent, discovering new articles across millions of online sources and delivering a daily list of qualified results based on your business logic. With Filtrbox G2 you will spend less time searching and more time making the critical decisions to make your business successful.
Yesterday, using the BackType Connect API Wesley from ImprovingTheWeb (who also created the My Comments Elsewhere WordPress plugin) released a new web application called, ConvoTrack.
ConvoTrack lets you view all the conversation surrounding a particular page as you browse it, through the service or a bookmarklet that’s offered. It also lets you shorten URLs that preload the accompanying conversation so you can post them to Twitter. Additionally, bloggers can place a small button on their websites that, when clicked, will show related comments from other blogs, Twitter, FriendFeed, Digg, Reddit, and more.
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.
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’ve recently introduced a highly requested feature that allows you to auto-subscribe to conversations using BackType Subscriptions. When you enable the auto-subscribe option in your Account Settings, all conversations you participate in will automatically add to your Subscriptions. That means you’ll receive e-mail updates whenever someone follows up with a comment.
Let us know what you think. More updates coming next week 
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!
We’re happy to announce our latest round of funding from True Ventures, led by Toni Schneider in January of this year. We’re extremely fortunate to have a group of people with such a deep understanding of the needs of an early-stage start-up on board with us at BackType, supporting the vision and direction of our company. With their investment, True Ventures join Y Combinator who funded us back in June, 2008. This marks a significant milestone for us; we’d like to thank you (all our users) for helping us get where we are today.
What’s Next
Since we launched in late August, 2008, we’ve been very focused on providing the best tools for publishers and comment authors to find, follow and share comments whether they appear on blogs or any other social media. Not only have we drastically improved our support and scale, we’ve developed lots of new features, most notably BackType Alerts, BackType Subscriptions and the recent BackType Connect. We built these tools to help you participate in the conversations that you’re interested in.