backtype connect - ReadWriteWeb

Backtype Connect Plugs in to WordPress

Phil Glockner — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 13:30:24 -0800

Backtype, known for its fast-growing comment-aggregation service, announced the availability of a new BackType Connect plugin for standalone WordPress blogs today. The plugin uses the newly-updated Connect API to integrate comments from a variety of different sources around the internet directly in to the WordPress comment system. Supported sources include Twitter, Digg, FriendFeed, Reddit, other blogs, and of course, Hacker News (since Backtype is a YCombinator startup). Installation is straightforward and comment import happens quickly.

]]> Backtype Connect is an offshoot project of the larger comment aggregation service that Backtype provides. While the primary service tracks all comments by comment author (optimally, no matter where they are posted), Connect focuses on tracking comments made around a specific URL on a number of different services. To further facilitate getting a true count of URL links in Twitter, they developed BackTweets as well, which we covered in more depth here. Thanks to Zee from TheNextWeb for the tip.

The way the Backtype Connect WordPress plugin works is fairly straightforward with no additional registration needed. After installation and activation on a WordPress standalone blog, the plugin queries the BackType Connect database with the article URLs and starts importing them in to the WordPress comment database, including a footnote with a source of the comment. Icons for all of the BT Connect services are also included so that the comments indicate clearly where they are coming from.

I took an hour this morning and installed BT Connect on my personal blog, Scribkin. Installation when smoothly, but I will warn you that if you are using a comment system that is a full replacement for the one built in to WordPress (like Intense Debate or Disqus) you won't see what Backtype Connect is doing since it is acting directly on the built-in comment database. The new comments will only start showing up after a sync. If, however, you are using other WordPress comment enhancement systems like SezWho and JS-Kit, there shouldn't be any problem.

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BackTweets Searches What Twitter Can't: Short URLs

Phil Glockner — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 15:30:00 -0800

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.

]]> First, let's focus on BackType Connect for a moment. This product is similar to PostRank where an article URL can be submitted and conversations, wherever they may happen, will be found and summarized. This is great for tracking buzz around an issue, or for further reading on a particular topic. But while it can invoke BackTweets to search for tweets around the referring URL, it is limited to searching for the particular article URL. For example, if you search for readwriteweb.com in BackType Connect, you will first come to a disambiguation page (seen below) before you can (eventually) look up specific Twitter results.

However, here's the beauty of using BackTweets search directly: You can put in any partial or complete URL and get a useful result. Go ahead and search for readwriteweb or backtype. You will get all tweets with a URL that contains what you are searching for. This means that as a general indicator of buzz on Twitter, you can cast your net even wider using BackTweets than you can with BackType Connect. Plus, this is something that Twitter Search is almost completely blind to - compressed (or shortened, or shrunk) URLs. BackType expands all URLs before they get stored so your search results will always contain all the tweets, no matter what service is used to make the URL shorter in the tweet.

This is all good news. But we would like to point out a couple of features that seem to be lacking. First, the biggest oversight is RSS support. Visually, searches performed on BackTweets look very similar to results from Twitter Search (down to the notification that new results have appeared). But once you are satisfied with your search term, there's no way of grabbing a feed of it and dropping it in to a feed reader or other utility. Second, and somewhat related, there does not seem to be an open API to get these results either.

We can understand the lack of an API, based on BackTweets status primarily as an ancillary search engine for BackType Connect. But it is frustrating that we can't get a feed of our search results. Hopefully this was more of an oversight rather than a deliberate decision, because without it BackTweets, as an external search interface, is more of a technical demo than an extensible tool.

Update: Mike Montano (@michaelmontano) of BackType commented to let us now that an RSS feed and an API are both in the works! This is great news! Thanks, Mike!]]> Discuss

Web 2.0 Conference Post Round-up

Richard MacManus — Sat, 08 Oct 2005 11:13:27 -0800

The conference is over now and so here's a summary of my blog output from it. I was pumping out the real-time notes over the last 3 days! I didn't have much time for analysis - my brain was full to the brim just absorbing everything. I intend to dive into the details over the next week or two. Here are the posts I wrote during the conference:

07: Cautious Optimism and Cynical Buzz (also published on ZDNet)
07: Discussion: Prosumer Media Mena Trott, Mark Fletcher, Rich Skrenta
07: Conversation: Sergey Brin of Google
07: Search engine stats: Jim Lanzone from Ask.com
07: Zimbra UI Minute
07: 3D Web Services
07: The Alumni Report Joe Kraus , Kim Polese
07: Google RSS Reader announced at Web 2.0
06: A Conversation with AOL CEO Jonathan Miller
06: Discussion: Open vs. Closed Models
06: Bubble or Bubble-let?
06: Mary Meeker talk
06: Yahoo CEO Terry Semel conversation
06: ZDNet post on the Terry Semel conversation
06: Flurry of Web 2.0 Business Activity
05: Web 2.0 Conference, first day impressions - ZDNet
05: Web 2.0 Conference coverage notes - Wed afternoon
05: Barry Diller conversation
05: Web 2.0 Conference Introduction
05: Web 2.0 Conference: Yahoo - What's New in the Search Ecosystem: Users, Publishers, and Advertisers
05: Web 2.0 Conference: Ad Models: A New Approach to Marketing?

Plus I took paper notes for the following, which I will turn into blog posts at some point:

05: Open Source Infrastructure workshop
05: Mash-ups 2.0: Where's the Business Model? workshop