BackType, one of the better conversation tracking tools we’ve come across so far, is releasing a couple of new features today that arguably make it a top gun in the space. The startup, launched in August 2008 on $15k thanks to Y Combinator’s summer program, has also closed a round of seed funding to the tune of $300,000 from True Ventures, led by the firm’s founder and partner Toni Schneider, notably also the CEO of Automattic (the company behind blogging powerhouse WordPress).
BackType, unlike commenting enablers like Disqus, JS-Kit, IntenseDebate and coComment, offers a one-stop destination for retrieving comments on just about any topic across a wide variety of blogging platforms and social services (Twitter, FriendFeed, etc.). You can do a simple keyword search but also track people specifically, e.g. Michael Arrington. Evidently, you can subscribe to search query results by RSS feed and e-mail (based on a keyword or only for an article you indicate). You can also feature your own comments across the web on your own blog using a widget.
Today the company is introducing a new feature dubbed BackType Connect, soon to be included in their API, which makes it even easier to follow conversations centered around a certain blog post or article. All you need to do is go to the website and enter the URL of the post, and BackType will fetch all the conversations around it and display the gist on one page, along with some stats.
As you can see in the second screenshot, there’s also a dedicated tab for ‘tweets’ i.e. Twitter messages, which comes in handy with Twitter now being a real-time search engine and all that. But it doesn’t stop there. BackType is today also launching BackTweets, a separate website where you can track conversations that are going around on the micro-sharing service, based on keywords or URLs (even when they are shortened!). For an example, check a search for ‘techcrunch.com’.
They also created a special page tracking the top links on Twitter, which can be somewhat compared to the functionality of Techmeme (or Tweetmeme, of course).
UberVU (our coverage) and Artiklz (our coverage) offer similar services, although in terms of quality of returned results BackType wins the race, at least for the couple of keywords and websites addresses we tested.
In this day and age, it’s essential for individuals, companies and brands to track conversations on the Internet, and BackType makes for an excellent service for weeding through comments on the social web, which can often prove invaluable. The startup still offers the basic functionality for free and is currently still figuring out how to make money from enabling companies and publishers to track those conversations, but it’s not like there are no opportunities there.
BackType seems very promising. I just dumped IntenseDebate because of too much spam and went back to native WordPress comments.
I like BackType for staying focused.
Why not use Disqus.com? They are way better
Jacob – sorry to hear that. Did you try our blacklisting options and Akismet integration? Feel free to drop me a line (support@intensedebate.com).
Great product, It’ll be interesting though how much people will use it?
TechFilipino
They now support http://blog.bac...ny-times-yedda/ NYTimes and NewMogul.com
Awesome job guys!!!
Backtype has been one of the best services for tracking comments and conversations online. I do not need to worry about which commenting system the blog uses – and the integration into Friendfeed means I only need to go to one place to track it all
Very good
Backtype is getting hotter
Indeed
I’ve dropped IntensDebate too, not because of spam. I dropped it because of some bugs and my blog pages was getting slow motion…
BT seems to be a good alternative
What bugs? We’d love to fix any that persist. Thanks!
I had dropped intensedebate long time back, already i m lazy to check up with all the things and top of that too much spam to go through.
Our spam filtering has come a long way – we’ve tightened up our filters and have implemented optional Akismet integration (along with IP, keyword, & email blacklisting). Any interest in giving IntenseDebate another shot?
Sure will check it out
BackType is an invaluable tool for marketing. Using it to market our iPhone application made sales go up by about 400%. Excellent tool!
Do people really care that much about tracking comments and conversations? This is a solution without a problem… I have never heard someone complain about not having this. Having said that, I congratulate them on building this with such a small amount of funding.
It does what it claims… I checked for some keywords and got a very satisfactory result
Backtype is really great for comment tracking.
This looks great, if it solves the problem of keeping tabs on followup comments to comments you’ve left on a blog post or whatever. So often I’ve commented on a blog post and then never checked back to see if anyone replied. That’s why FriendFeed is so good. Trouble with FF, is that it means those people have to tie their blog into FF to get the benefit. Be interesting to see how BackType competes in this space.
Neil: Check out BackType Subscriptions — it e-mails you whenever someone comments on a URL you specify. Hope that helps!
better than twitter for research. use it to track locator language trends. maybe if they had a better domain name they would have better traction. i happen to like backtype domain. maybe others find it confusing. if there is any doubt as to who i am as a blogger, backtype is the proof of my pudding.
http://www.back...ple?q=mylocator
KnowLocator.com – wise up
wow … all your comments in one place.
As a former marketing person for a social media monitoring service (Techrigy) I can attest that tracking comments and conversations is very important, especially for B-B marketing. These conversations connect you directly to people with an interest in our brand, business sector or reputation. As a tool for finding highly qualified leads, i.e. those people who want your product info, a service like Backtype can be incredibly valuable. If they need a business model I can give it to them!
@Christopher Golda Yeah I’ve set that up based on your recommendation. I assume it just works automagically as long as I always put my website URL in when leaving comments?
Excellent
Neil: The Subscriptions don’t really work based on replies unfortunately — they will e-mail you on any new comment, whether it’s in reply to you or not. You don’t even need to comment on the post if you don’t want to. Hope that makes it more clear.
@Christopher Golda: Hmm okay that’s fair enough. The problem I’m trying to solve is a way of getting notifications of follow-up comments when I comment on a post. Your website states "Whenever you fill out the "Website" or "URL" field in a comment form when you publish a comment on a blog or other website, BackType attributes it to you." That sounds cool, so is there a way of automagically connecting that with the subscriptions feature?
Neil: The text you’re referring to is about claiming your own comments. What we’ll do is put together an "auto-subscribe" feature that users can enable so they automatically receive e-mail updates to posts they participate in — which is what I think you’re looking for. I’ll let you know when we release it.
@Christopher Golda: Yes! That sounds just like it. I can then manage those subscriptions at a later date if I want to leave the party on a particular URL. It’d be cool if the subscriptions were grouped by domain name, to make that management easier. Nice work here, it’s looking really awesome.
About time Toronto kids make quality headlines for quality products. Congrats!
BT is an example of how to build a great web service. Well done guys!
Excellent post. I have to say, I still prefer Disqus or IntenseDebate…
installing as we speak…
Why is it that no one seems to be using Backtype?