BackType, a Y Combinator startup that launched in August, is a sort of “Twitter for comments” that aggregates comments from millions of blogs into a single, searchable, parsable stream.
Today they launched a new feature called Alerts that will let users track keywords included in comments on tracked blogs – a sort of Google Alerts for blog comments.
This will be useful to anyone who likes to track what’s being said about them, their companies or their brands online. Google Alerts only show keywords that are in the main text of articles or stories, and sometimes only catches keywords when they are included in titles of stories. BackType gives users another level of information.
For now alerts can be tracked on the site’s dashboard or via email delivered daily, weekly or whenever a new one pops up.
This should give those of you anxiously awaiting the return of Twitter Track, which does the same thing for Twitter messages, something to play with in the meantime.
They also launched a new feature today called Subscriptions, which allow users to track comments on any blog post. Many blogs already have a built in feature that emails readers when a new comment is left on a post to let them keep up with the discussion. BackType now allows people to duplicate the feature for blogs that don’t have it.
I must give a jab here. When Mahalo wants to track whats being said about them, they come (at least, recently) to TC.
For some reason, I thought this had already been done. Looks sweet nevertheless.
Quite useless… I mean, comments?!
I will use this. Gives a lot of us an opportunity to see how customers react to product changes, etc.
But Google Alerts already do this!
Google alerts don’t normally search comments. Use g alerts and b alerts for a week and you’ll see.
Sure they do. I get G Alerts all of the time from keywords in comments only.
Very Beatufiul http://tinyurl.com/4rdhmc
Mike, you’re right. The BackType service is great, and I think the team has done a solid job.
But I believe the Alerts feature was actually released at the end of September.
BackType Launches Widgets and Alerts to Extend Comments Tracker
http://www.loui...-alerts-to.html
Hey Louis,
Today we actually extended Alerts to include Subscriptions:
http://blog.bac...-subscriptions/
Now you can follow comments by:
1. Author
2. Search Term (covered here)
3. Post
Thanks for your comment!
Okay, thanks for the clarification. I knew the Alerts themselves weren’t new, but it appears they have been extended.
What about Video comments. HARD BIZ there
Excellent service for tracking brand mentions in comments!
Not useful at all, especially considering the comments are literally stolen off the blogs they come from and it’s impossible to opt out without editing your robots.txt file, BackType is a scrapper site and I don’t like it.
Yes, they’re reproduced I guess. Not even google does that. Providing search is one thing, serving whole comments is not!
BackType needs to change their ways and stop stealing content. They don’t have the right to reproduce ANYONE’s comments on their site.
Someone needs to send a cease & desist notice against them.
A cease and desist letter for blog comments? You’re joking right?
It’s actually very useful; we use it all the time.
Pretty interesting.
Without making any changes to my Google alert settings, I already receive the alerts from mentions in the comments and such.
I may be missing something and BackType may have something really cool under the hood but I could not see it now.
Anyway, I wish BackType very best with this and all other initiatives.
Best,
Raj
That’s unusual — I’ve never received a Google Alert for a search term mentioned in comments on blogs, digg, reddit, etc. We’ve found that BackType Alerts and Google Alerts are very complementary.
To monitor mentions, I use a combination of BackType Alerts, Google Alerts, Twitter Search and FriendFeed Search.
Thank you Christopher.
As an example, via Google Alerts, I got an alert on a search term right on this comment thread.
I am sure BackType will do something more but I am not able to see it right now.
Will keep watching and wish you all the very best.
Cheers,
Raj
I have been a use of backtype from long and the only problem is that many blogs are not added automatically even if comments were found, and we need to contact them to add the blogs ex : http://www.back...ni.com%252fblog
It will be useful to them who wants to get alerts for comments about what has been said about them for the comments they made on particular blog\site.
I read this post this morning and I signed up immediately. I am already digging this service. Here’s why:
1) I think comments can be the life blood of a good blog conversation.
2) The will tweet your comments … great for SN.
3) The provide good analysis for potential followers in my social network.
I am a fan of google alerts and I just signed up for backtype. Let’s see how it works.
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