Backtype (YC summer 08): Twitter for comments launches | Hacker News Reader

Backtype (YC summer 08): Twitter for comments launches

techcrunch.com

67 pointsrokhayakebe31 comments

Although the article calls it Twitter for comments I think it is more a Google for Comments.

We've been using BackType in Beta for a while now and it has been an incredibly useful service. They're already a good way to keep up on what people are saying about your business (much like Google Groups) and as they add more blogs to the fold it will only increase the usefulness.

Great job guys.

BackType fills a huge need for every startup founder out there who wants to keep on top of what people are saying about their product. I look at it every day.

The BackType guys have really nailed it.

I find it quite unfortunate that this is termed as a "Twitter for comments" rather than just a comment tracker. The application has merit in itself, regardless of Twitter's existence and history. This would have been useful even before Twitter.

Fair enough. We've found it a useful way to explain the idea of following all your friends comments. There are two ways people are using it right now; following comments by the author (twitter for comments), and searching them by keywords.

ahem Kayak for Sports Tickets

This is straight out of Made to Stick. It gets people to understand what you're saying or building very very quickly. Once you're established, the word linking is no longer necessary.

They should have marketed themselves the TicketStumbler of comments, but I digress.

Youtube was originally "the flickr of video."

http://www.siliconbeat.com/entries/2005/08/14/youtube_the_fl...

I found "Google for comments" to be quite appropriate.

I think this is a useful analogy, if only because it uses the "followers" concept.

As a long-time blogger that has seen comment-based startups come and go, I have to say this is pretty badass. Unlike those failed comment-tracking companies I don't have to install a plugin or what have you, backtype just indexes. Neat to find some of the comments I've made in the past - although I have a feeling I've made more than 80 comments in the last 1-2 years.

Anyways, eloquent solution guys. :-) And I'm loving the clickpass support. 1 minute registration. However with the clickpass registration I did not receive feedback that my username was taken.. it just hung, but I assumed "Paul" was taken so I tried again and it worked.

Glad you're enjoying it. Clickpass is awesome indeed, but there are a couple things we need to fix. Thanks for spotting that.

FYI Everyone can add their Hacker News comments to their profiles too -- add http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=YOUR_USERNAME to the list of websites on your account page. Alternatively, you could just do a people search for your username and claim it from there.

Pardon me if this has been addressed completely before, but you are storing the comments on your server, right (I wouldn't believe you if you say no anyway)? Privacy issues aside, what about copyright issues?

Disqus, for example, says that the comment owners are owned by the commenters. Suppose then, as a comment owner I want to prohibit you from storing it on your servers?

Legally, the copyright of comments doesn't seem to work the way Disqus says. If you comment on my weblog, I have a right to reproduce it as I see fit, as you've voluntarily given it to me for the express purpose of reproducing it, knowing full well that I will reproduce it indefinitely. In fact, people who comment are almost invariably disappointed (or worse) if their comments are not reproduced immediately and indefinitely.

The website owner is actually doing commenters a service by publishing their comments. In the case where the website owner publishes links to the commenters' sites; the website owner has also compensated the commenters with a bartered advertisement. Even without publishing the link, the website owner has provided a service to the commenter that the commenter has purposefully chosen to utilize.

On the other hand, nobody has given the comment aggregator (Backtype in this case) any permission to reproduce any part of the website and/or comments. Backtype's republication of the content is allowed only if it is done as fair use.

From looking at what Backtype does with my own comments, its usage of the content isn't anywhere close to fair use. That will be especially true if/when they attempt to monetize my comments. I personally would rather not have Backtype (or any other company) republish my comments without my permission. Instead, I would rather monetize my own comments myself, on my own site, by implementing a similar service myself (see http://firehose.diveintomark.org/ for an example).

Robot.txt file. You can tell Google to do the same thing.

Only the site owner can use Robots.txt. The commenter cannot control it.

The Backtype RSS feed for your company name is now required reading, fellas. You'd have to be crazy to pass up on a chance to get feedback and join conversations about your product. Just hope that your competition hasn't already started using it.

Totally agree, I've wanted this to exist for a while. Thanks guys.

in addition to the search.twitter.com one

I would pay gobs of money per month for this service once they have analytics and cover more blogs. Great job guys.

Cool. Possible to do anything to solve the www-vs-no-www (essentially duplicate content) issues?

(entered my websites then immediately wondered if I should enter them with/without the www as I may sometimes leave that out when commenting.. also searched for a friend and his blog came up twice in the people search results)

those are technically different urls, so we'll have to do something to figure that out. you won't see duplicate comments as a result, just duplicate people.

right now putting both on your profile helps because then people looking for your comments will see them all in one place.

thanks for the feedback

aye.. might be worth going with the notion that chances of different sites existing at www.domain and http://domain (in particular those different sites being used as the identities of two different people) is probably 0.00somethingverysmall.. sure google etc do their funky duplicate content detection but y'know, i reckon you guys could just add a "this aint right" button in the same style as your ones to flag fakes etc, and then just wait for the day anyone actually uses it before worrying what to do about this.

[not criticizing but curious]: what's your competitive advantage with respect to Google?

Google's blog search doesn't search blog comments, and doesn't (explicitly) search on comment author. But google could add these things easily. What protects you? I'm guessing:

  (a) this niche is too small/specialized for google to care; or
  (b) if google did care, they buy you. Liquidity event!

This is a nice product. Do you have an API that would allow one specify a company name and it returns a feed or so of mentions? Anything like that planned?

An API is one of our top priorities.

Like how soon are we talking of here? Couple of weeks? Or couple of months?

Looks awesome...great job!

thanks man. I added your blog to backtype :)

http://www.backtype.com/

Makes you want to rethink what you say online. The application was able to bring identities that I thought were completely separated online. Great job

So you can 'claim' anyone's comments as your own?

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