BackType

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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BackTweets lets you search for links on Twitter. Searching with keywords will match any URL they’re used in; full URLs will help track links to articles, blog posts, videos and whatever else you’re interested in.

Now you can add alerts for the searches you’re following and receive updates via e-mail. Like BackType Alerts, you can set your emails to be delivered immediately, daily, or once a week.

Over the weekend, we released advanced search for BackTweets, the service we created a couple of months ago that lets you search for links on Twitter. Advanced search filters have been requested many times and we’ll continue to improve them as we find time. Currently, you’re able to filter link searches by date, as well as the user that tweeted and the user the tweet was in response to. These parameters are also available in the BackTweets API. And now there’s a tweet counter at the bottom of the search results so you can see exactly how many times the URL you searched for has been tweeted.

Are there any features you’d like to see in BackTweets? Please let us know in the comments!

While we were creating BackType Connect, we realized how incredibly valuable all the tweets related to articles and posts that we were surfacing really were. Over a million links are tweeted per day, often obfuscated by URL shorteners with no way for publishers to see who’s talking about their content. It’s a common problem for companies too – we had no idea how many people were tweeting comments from BackType. While BackType Connect already shows tweets (as well as comments from blogs, FriendFeed, Digg, Reddit, and many more), we thought it would be interesting to use our Twitter support exclusively to create BackTweets. Simply put, BackTweets lets you search for links on Twitter.

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