BackType: Twitter For Your Comments
Good blog comments are like diamonds in the rough — you might need to sift through quite a bit of superfluous junk to find one, but when you do they can provide great criticisms, insights and helpful links.
To help narrow your search and make it easier to find noteworthy comments, a new site by the name of BackType is actively indexing comments from all over the web. The result is search engine for finding noteworthy comments that might otherwise be lost in the noise.
But more than just a search engine, BackType turns comments into a Twitter-like system where you can follow people you trust, receiving a steady stream of updates whenever they post a comment anywhere on the web.
Unlike distributed comments systems such as Disqus, BackType doesn’t offer any comment tools for your site, nor does it require you to enroll to get your site indexed. Rather BackType’s crawlers simply index all the comments on your site, mash them together with millions of others and provide a search engine to find what you’re looking for.
The most obvious use for BackType is to find discussions about say, your site, product or company, happening on other blogs and venues that you probably wouldn’t otherwise know about. For instance, searching for Webmonkey led me to several articles and posts about our tutorials that I hadn’t seen before.
The other potentially useful feature is the ability to follow people on the site. This feature acts just like Twitter in the sense that you can track someone’s comments from across the web, feeding updates to your newsreader or where ever you like.
When you’re looking at an individual’s stream of comments, you can further filter by the site they were commenting on. For example if you want to see my comments, but only when I post on a particular blog, it’s easy to do so.
On the downside BackType’s comment indexing appears somewhat limited at the moment. From what I can tell it doesn’t handle comments that use JavaScript (like Webmonkey, or anyone using Disqus), nor have its spiders reached the dustier corners of the web.
But the site is young and working to add more content. For the time being if you’re interested in following the every move of the web/tech movers and and shakers, file BackType along with Twitter, FriendFeed and the rest.
[via TechCrunch]
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