Some Twitter ecosystem partners will likely call this a betrayal of Twitter's public calls to build analytics services on its platforms, instead of Twitter clients, after Twitter acquired favored client software providers. Personally, I see this as another failure of the social media economy to sustain providers of more than crude self-interested promotion and broadcast.

When companies like Twitter or Google talk about publisher analytics, they don't mean analytics that will help new media publishers more effectively listen to the world around them that they are reporting on. They mean they are providing tools for old-fashioned one-way broadcasters to optimize their message-pushing to get maximum results in a strange, new pseudo-two-way media world.

It was awesome and a great way to follow what your favorite people were saying in distributed conversations. Here at ReadWriteWeb, we took Robert Scoble's Twitter List of the Most Influential People in Tech and we scraped all their Twitter bios for homepage URLs. Then we built an OPML file of the RSS feeds from BackType for all the comments those people posted around the internet, with those scraped URLs in the URL field of the comment.

Last spring when the Activity Streams Working Group added a new type of social network update type called Action Streams to its tech spec wiki, group leader Chris Messina posted a comment about it somewhere around the web. I received an SMS notifying me of the comment (as I always do whenever Messina or a handful of other high priority people post a comment on a blog, anywhere) and was able to get a story about the news and its significance up within an hour.

When real-time feed middleware service Superfeedr added support for automatic geolocation text parsing to every feed it delivered content for last Spring, founder Julien Genestoux asked me, "How did you know we had done that?" I later told him late at night at South by Southwest that it was because he had posted a comment on a 2 year old blog post about the Yahoo Placemaker API complaining about the shortage of tech support.

When Mitch Kapor or Bram Cohen posts a comment on someone's blog, I want to know about it.

I assume this feature will be killed promptly.

Not everyone engages in competitive news blogging and wants every little whisper from a white labeled list of people sent to them in real time, but anyone could benefit from a tool for listening to distributed conversations around the Web. Unfortunately, just as was the case with Google's recent acquisition of magic listening tool turned publisher analytics provider Postrank, listening to other people as competitive advantage still hasn't caught on widely enough to be a sustainable business.

The collapse of DIY screen scraping and RSS feed creation tool Dapper into an ad network and then a Yahoo property is another example.

You keep swallowing up the sad shells of formerly great social software startups, though, you big companies and your retrograde, black-hearted, disinterested incumbent customers. You can turn their algorithms and code towards nihilistic optimization for optimization's sake that yesterday's media will pay for today - but you can't take us power users alive.

Some of us will continue loving those startups while they are still on the frontiers: optimistic, lungs full of clean fresh air and interested in what other people have to say - the promise of truly social media.

Maybe someday that model of social software as truly social will become economically sustainable. Or maybe not. In the meantime there will probably remain a fresh supply of beautiful, if short lived, visions for using all these platforms for listening, engaging, amplifying the voices of others and for building value for ourselves through adding value to others. I sure hope so.

Today's Companies:

Topsy, a real-time search engine that includes social sites within its Web, raised $15 million. Clovr Media, a digital advertising startup that converts banner, text, mobile ads or video into Card Linked Offers (CLOs), raised $8.3 million in its second round of funding.

GrubHub raised $20 million in funding, which will help the restaurant location directory grow its existing technologies and expand into new cities. It wants to make it even easier for us to order in a pizza (the most heavily ordered cuisine according to its "about page). SnagAJob.com, an online employment site with listings from full-time to one-hour commitments, raised $27 million in a Series C round of funding.

Rovio, the Finnish game company behind Angry Birds, raised $42 million in Series A round. Niklas Zennstrom, founder of Skype, is one of several investors. GroupCommerce, a commerce platform targeted at group-buying for publishers and merchants, raised $8 million.

BackType, a San Francisco-based Web-marketing company that helps businesses understand social analytics, raised $1 million.

With all this money being invested, which company do you think is ready to change our world?

Last April, BackType released its first Wordpress plugin. Unlike the original plugin, which features comments from sources like Twitter, Digg, FriendFeed,Reddit and other blogs, the new plugin only focuses on Twitter.

Installing the plugin is straightforward. If you use Wordpress, you can find the plugin and instructions for installing it here. If you use another blog engine, the widget can be found here. You don't need to register with BackType to use this service.

If nobody has tweeted anything interesting about your site yet, BackType will give your readers the option to send a tweet right from the widget. Sadly, BackType didn't integrate a re-tweet feature into the plugin, which would have made the service even more useful for publishers.

Here is the new BackType widget in action:

BackType is obviously working in a crowded market. As a search engine, it has to compete with successful startups like OneRiot, while its plugin competes with more complete offerings from Disqus and JS-Kit. At the same time, though, the simplicity of the plugin is its greatest strength. If you don't want to replace your current comment system but would like to bring in more discussions from Twitter to your blog, the new BackType plugin is definitely worth a look.

The web moves fast enough that we may as well start looking at what comes next. Easy to use and affordable tools like Radian6 and ScoutLabs that track blog and twitter mentions are a given - but what kinds of crazy innovations can we hope for in the future?

Here's what we're thinking that might look like. We base these predictions in part on a conversation with Chris Golda of social media discussion search engine Backtype. Backtype is used under the hood at Radian6 and the company just announced a new partnership with Filterbox today. For an in-depth look at some of these kinds of services, see Social Media Monitoring Grudge Match: Radian6 vs. Scout Labs by Jason Falls. In house we use FriendFeed search a lot.

None of our predictions for the future are terribly shocking; to some degree they are just further developments of the same core value propositions these services already focus on. Hopefully this discussion will help spur some original thinking on your part, readers, and you can throw some suggestions for the future of the industry out in comments.

More Sources, Especially Facebook

The most obvious place for social media monitoring tools to go next is into Facebook. Twitter is the primary target for analysis right now because it's wide open and programmatically accessible. It's also 10% the size of Facebook. We're not sure whether Facebook is going to open up further or if monitoring tools are going to find a way to get around the fundamentally closed nature of the site to at least sample the conversations going on there. Can you imagine a monitoring company paying a wildly popular Facebook user to open up access to their newsfeed to monitoring? We can; it's a surprise that it's not already happening.

There's also a lot of multimedia to monitor, including television and radio content that is increasingly easy to find online. We expect that speech-to-text search services like Everyzing will find a place in the social media monitoring technology toolkit in the near future.

Source Analysis

Backtype's Chris Golda says that his company is working on more sophisticated analysis of participants in discovered conversations. If Robert Scoble says something bad about your company in comments, that's probably going to go further than if someone with a relatively small circle of connections does.

This is something that all the monitoring companies do now but it's relatively crude. We can imagine a much more sophisticated analysis. For every person online - primary circles of friends, semantic analysis of areas of interest and personal background information are all readily available in tools like Mailana, Twazzup, Calais (disclosure: RWW sponsor) and Headup. Imagine that information served up in an interface like Apture, but for every person and conversation on the web.

This is the kind of thing that data portability makes easier - when people travel around the web with their profiles and data with them, they are easier to get to know in a hurry. That's true for both the technologies that would serve up personalized content and the companies that would monitor what we do.

Conversation Discovery

If it's all about "joining the conversation," one of the biggest challenges for organizations jumping into social media is finding and prioritizing all the conversations available. Golda says that Backtype is working on becoming "like Compete for communities." Postrank is doing something like this already; it's discovering the most "engaging" blogs on a wide variety of topics. It's still ridiculously difficult to identify the most important sites of conversation on a given topic though. That's a problem ripe for solving.

We'd also like to see some real-time threshold monitoring. Let me know the moment that conversation about me or a given topic hits a certain level of intensity.

Those are some of the things we expect to see come to the world of social media monitoring in the near future. What else do you expect - or what would you really like to see?

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]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/backtweets_searches_what_twitter_cant_short_urls.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/backtweets_searches_what_twitter_cant_short_urls.php News Fri, 06 Mar 2009 15:30:00 -0800 Phil Glockner Conversation tracking service Co.mments has announced this morning that it will cease operations at the end of the week, one month before its 3rd anniversary online. The service was at one time reviewed favorably compared to similar services that have gone on to be acquired or funded by investors. A respectable number of users quickly bemoaned the decision in comments on the company blog.

Thousands of services are launched online every year and only a small number of those prove to have as much longevity. Today's new paradigm trailblazer will often be tomorrow's dead-end hassle for its developer. Such is the nature of a rapidly iterating web and such is the fate of Co.mments.

There's a reason why so many people start comment tracking companies - online comments are filled with valuable user data and there's a compelling human element to keeping track of responses to what you've said on blogs. It's not hard to imagine Facebook Connect owning this space within a year, though. We're cheering, none the less, for open standards in the portable identity, data and contacts sphere.

Co.mments hasn't announced any plan for users to export their data. Update: The company just posted instructions on how to export your tracking data.

Project founder Assaf Arkin has a day job as the CTO of open source business process management company Intalio. You can track his other development work at GitHub.

BackType Subscriptions sends you an e-mail with updates that you can choose to receive as they happen, daily or weekly. Subscriptions is also offered via RSS. While most blogging platforms already offer a similar service, BackType fills the gap for those that don't.

With the amount of people socializing on the Web and leaving comments across the blogosphere, online reputation management is crucial. Not keeping up means you may miss out on important conversations about you or your brand - especially when they occur in the comment sections. Just look at the recent controversy surrounding Motrin.

Monitor Comments Across the Web

BackType can monitor comments you leave, or it can monitor comments that a person you specify leaves across the Web. Brilliant if you're interested in knowing what someone is talking about online, or if you want to know which sites they're commenting on. It also offers a search function by keyword letting you see at a glance how often your keyword appears in comments, where it appears and gives you an easy way to reply.

How it works

Once you sign up for an account, BackType scans the blogosphere looking for your URL in comment forms and attributes the comment to you by placing it on your profile page.

In a nutshell, BackType:

• Provides a unique URL that you can use if you don't have your own Web site
• Aggregates all of the comments you leave across the Web
• Aggregates comments written or shared by the people you're following
• Lets you search for comments on specific topics and follow those written by the people you care about
• Offers keyword specific search so you can easily find comments that mention your industry, products, services, competitors
• Provides an alert service that tracks keywords in comments and e-mails them to you (much like Google Alerts, but for comments)
• Allows you to track comments by blog post via Subscriptions
• Has created two widgets; one displays your own comments, the other shared comments
• Is available on FriendFeed
• Supports Digg, Reddit, Intense Debate, Live Journal and Vox comments

Potential problems

Potential problems could arise if people use your name to comment, but BackType has planned for that by offering a moderation option.

While it doesn't compete directly with JS-Kit, SezWho, and Disqus as it isn't a plugin, it could be considered a competitor to Artiklz which is also focused on aggregating comments.

So if you're a blogger or just interested in being informed about conversations in the blogosphere, why not give it a shot?

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