BackType specializes in searching "the conversation," people (YC S08) | Hacker News Reader

BackType specializes in searching "the conversation," people (YC S08)

arstechnica.com

9 pointsterpua6 comments

Somebody show me a service where I enter a URL, and it shows me comments on that URL across networks such as Digg, Reddit, and maybe even Hacker News, and I'll be impressed, and I'll thank you.

I've read that uberVU is going to do this, and Artiklz is supposed to be able to do this but there's nowhere on their site to access it. Somebody needs to do this!

Edit: right now, I'm impressed by Twitturly, which manages to do this for Twitter, a problem made more difficult by the amount of tweets and the fact that URLs are shortened with several different services.

I was quoted in the article saying that we're working on it. In fact, we could release comments from originating source, Digg, Reddit and Hacker News right now, but we'd like to include more than that. Very few conversations extend to Digg, Reddit and Hacker News.

It will be available in a few different ways, including what you mentioned (entering a URL and seeing the "conversational graph").

We're open to more suggestions -- thanks for the feedback!

Perfect! I'm working on a mega-bookmarklet type app (to be released very soon) which organizes various web services and actions, and would love to feature some sort of "discussions on this URL" action.

For now, I'm stuck with "view this on Digg", "view this on Reddit", etc... which will work well for users of those specific networks, but not for someone such as myself who wants to get a wider view of discussions across all networks.

I have to ask, if most comments don't extend to Digg, Reddit, etc, where do they come from? The blog post itself?

We're definitely going to have this available through the API, so look out for our release.

In addition to Digg, Reddit and Hacker News, we're looking at other blogs as well as FriendFeed and Twitter.

API access is great, and there's a ton that could be done with that. (I've long had an idea that by arbitraging the popularity of an article across various networks, money could be made... your API could provide that data).

My app aims to be a kick-off service that allows users to jump to whatever web service they need to use at that moment... without me having to do any other work than pointing them to the correct URL... so I don't prefer the onus to be on me to create this functionality with your API :)

My own personal needs aside, I think the web-wide discussion of a URL is a pretty impressive and useful feature for general consumption... I really hope you include it.

My experience so far with BackType has been decent. I'd love to see it integrated with a service like Google Analytics since conversations are becoming a more significant part of analytics these days.

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