Ever since its launch I’ve been a huge fan of BackType. The social media application is one of the most useful tools I’ve seen yet, both from a personal and a business viewpoint. The way it works is simple:
- Users set up an account at BackType and register (or claim) their blog or website URL’s. These would be the ones that you would normally input whenever leaving a comment on a blog. If you’re not a blog owner, BackType will provide you one when you register.
- This then allows BackType to recognize you whenever you post a comment to any blog you visit. That comment will then be attributed to you for the lifetime of that blog post.
The benefits of this are two-fold. You can have an immediate visual history of all the comments you’ve ever left (as long as the same URL has been used by you). Additionally, you can revisit posts from years ago and see if your views have changed.
On top of that, you can also follow your favourite bloggers and see what comments they are making. This allows you a great insight into the mindset of the people you respect and read regularly. And as a tool for businesses, knowing what’s being said about your company can offer an excellent opportunity to gauge public opinion of you.
Now, BackType are adding to the benefits already offered with a slew of new features. In a newsletter sent to BackType users, the company made the following announcement:
We’ve been releasing a lot of new things at BackType over the past month; we thought a newsletter would be a great way to keep you up-to-date. Here’s what we’ve been up to:
We’re proud to announce that BackType has been added as an official service on FriendFeed. Now you can easily add all of the comments you write to your FriendFeed account ? it will work even if you’ve already added Disqus and Intense Debate, so no need to remove those.
BackType Alerts sends you an e-mail update (immediately, or in daily or weekly digests) whenever a subscribed search term is mentioned in a comment. You can also monitor your alerts via RSS or through the alerts tab in your BackType Dashboard. Think Google Alerts for comments.
Lots of people have discovered BackType through Twitter; in fact, we have our own account @backtype that we like to use to get feedback and help you out when things go wrong. So we thought Twitter would be a great place to share the comments you write. Now you can setup auto-posting to Twitter in daily or weekly digests. You can also tweet any comment individually ? just click the tweet link beneath the comment.
Several people have been asking for a way to display their latest comments on their blog, so we released three widgets ? to display your comments, your shared comments and search results, respectively. All widgets are stretch-to-fit, designed to fit in the sidebar of a blog. Try them on your blog and let us know what you think.
We’ve released a comprehensive API so developers can leverage our data set; in fact, there are already developers building applications with it. If you’re working on something cool, we’d love to hear from you.
We’ve been noticing some interesting statistics and trends with comments and comment behavior that we wanted to share. So one night we decided to build a small application called BackType Trends to demonstrate ? and we made it available for developers to explore via our API. BackType Trends lets you graph mentions of keywords and topics made in millions of comments.
As I said at the beginning of this post, BackType was already one of my favourite social media apps. With these new additions to its service, maybe it will become one of yours too.
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