BackType

At BackType, we’re constantly experimenting and prototyping – to help us explore new ideas, learn and have fun. BackType Labs is another place for us to show you some of the stuff we’re working on.

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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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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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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.

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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!

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!

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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