BackType is aiming to solve a long-standing problem that reared its face when blogs met new forms social media and news sites. The problem I’m referring to is comment separation anxiety. Comments have feelings too. They don’t like being separated. BackType’s Connect WordPress plugin uses their Connect API to suck in all comments related to your blog post, whether they’re on Twitter, FriendFeed, Digg, Reddit, Hacker News and more. The end result is one big conversation on your blog post. Comments are stored in your WordPress database too, so there’s no worrying about some remote service having downtime and your blog not displaying all comments.
BackType Connect Plugin settings
The plugin has some basic settings right now. Things like selecting which sources you want comments to come from. For example, you might — with good reason — not want your blog to display comments from Digg. Then you can select if you’d like comments to be sorted according to their timestamp, or just have all external comments posted after your regular comments. Each new comment BackType brings in receives a small “This comment was originally posted on Hacker News” type banner to let readers know its origins.
However, in this age of threaded comments, BackType Connect seems to break some of the immediate cognition that comes with threaded comment layouts. That being said, BackType Connect is brand new and has much development ahead of it. For example, the plugin only goes back through posts from 2009 as BackType didn’t start indexing FriendFeed and Twitter until then. Regardless, it’s definitely promising and I’m looking forward to what it will become.
BackType was a Summer ’08 Y Combinator startup that recently raised $300k from True Ventures, which has some ties to Automattic, so that might have something to do with BackType’s interest in developing a WordPress plugin. You can read up more on what BackType is and follow my comments on my BackType account.
To see example BackType Connect WP integration, click through from your RSS reader.
What do you think of bringing in commentary from various sources regarding the same article? Does it dilute the conversation or unify it and make it easier to follow?
{ 39 comments… read them below or add one }
I’m a fan of this. On http://www.openthedialogue.com, we’re using the services that Disqus has built-in which seems to be effective so far.
Although, there is no denying that it changes the context of things. I sort of lean on the side of the fence that a lot of these different networks lend a certain kind of context to how you communicate. There are some people whom I follow on Twitter who I don’t read their blog (I talk more about this here: http://www.openthedialogue.com/2009/03/distributed-audiences/) and seeing links to a certain post on Twitter, outside the entirety of the conversation surrounding it on said network, might sway opinions and perceptions of someone looking to leave a comment w/ the only influence being what you wrote. Certainly food for thought.
By the way, like what you did with the summary section.
Your website caches the actual content of the comments, but it doesn’t cache the avatar. Most of the external avatars are blocked by my anti-social-networking firewall at work.
I like it, but a agree with the concerns about the comment flow. I like how Y! Combinator has a huge icon…maybe the services that show the user’s avatar can have a little icon of that service in the corner of the avatar…or there’s an icon along with “This comment was originally posted on X” for a little more clarity.
It would also be really nice if you could sort by service right on the page instead of having to go to Backtype. Something like this:
Oops, guess you don’t allow img tags.
http://annielausier.com/i/pstam.jpg
oooh that is really slick!
Great ideas, Annie!
We’ve thought a lot about the next version of the plugin and would really like to do some filtering by service. Regarding the little icons, that would be something that could be done now with some knowledge of CSS. Every BackType comment is given two additional classes: “btc-comment” as well as one indicating the service like “btc-twitter”
Thanks for your comment
Hadn’t seen this before, thanks for posting. I had actually toyed with the idea of importing tweets into comments using hashtags but this seems to be much better way of doing it. I’ll have to play around with it a bit, not yet sure if it’s more helpful or more confusing.
I don’t know… are we simplifying things or making things more complex? I’ve given up on FriendFeed as it diverts conversation from my blog.
My logic is that even if you don’t use FF yourself, your readers will, so it makes sense just to tie that conversation back into your original article. While I am not the biggest FF user, I have my account and I check it from time to time to see if people have liked/commented on any of my auto-posted feed items. It’s a good brand management tool as well.
I am wondering it this would work with Disqus?
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work on disqus comment management system but disqus has released their own version.
if i did this correctly, this tweet will appear on my blog as a comment http://bit.ly/PHtIU (BackType Connect post) http://bit.ly/GMcqF
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Paul, thanks for the great review and kind words. We’ve got lots to improve and these posts really help. For example, threading is very high on the list of things to do (we knew HN users especially would notice its absence). Looking fwd to hearing more feedback both on your blog and hacker news.
This comment was originally posted on Hacker News
Yeah I can vouch for the threading. My load averages went up a good bit when I first started using it and it was importing comments..
This comment was originally posted on Hacker News
All imports are done in the background using wp-cron so they shouldn’t be directly affecting page load. But if you turned off any caching, given the traffic your blog sees, that’s understandable.
This comment was originally posted on Hacker News
I like the idea, but I think there will be too much noise. Can you filter out twitter? Your real comments will most likely get lost in a flood of uninformative tweets like "good post by @stammy:", "reading: ", and ReTweets. It would also be nice if the reply button in WP took you to it’s respective service, or else the user will never know there was a reply.
This comment was originally posted on FriendFeed
I like the idea, but I think there will be too much noise. Can you filter out twitter? Your real comments will most likely get lost in a flood of uninformative tweets like "good post by @stammy:", "reading: ", and ReTweets. The other issues is that you can’t reply from one place.
This comment was originally posted on FriendFeed
doh! apparently editing a FriendFeed comment will cause it to be re-posted.
Yeah, that’s another thing we need to address. In same cases it’s a feature, rather than a bug, but not this case.
Shared: First Impressions: BackType Connect WP Plugin http://bit.ly/3BLe8C
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Daniel: you can filter out by source (twitter, digg, reddit, friendfeed, etc) as well as filter out RTs. RT filtering is pretty simple, we’ve already had requests for more advanced filtering — so that will likely come in the next version.
This comment was originally posted on FriendFeed
oh i meant actual server load via top
This comment was originally posted on Hacker News
Awesome I have been waiting for someone to do this for awhile now. This looks great. I will integrate it into my blog soon after learning a bit more.Congrats to the teams this will fill a huge need for bloggers who aren’t able to follow the discussion they themselves start.
This comment was originally posted on Hacker News
Thanks so much! If you find the plugin isn’t for you, or you want something for non WP blogs, Wesley over at http://www.improvingtheweb.com made a great new app with our API (convotrack.com). Check out the button on the left side here: http://www.micropersuasion.com/2009/03/social-networking-dem…;
This comment was originally posted on Hacker News
First Impressions: BackType Connect WP Plugin http://ff.im/-21TPy
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
First Impressions: BackType Connect WP Plugin – PaulStamatiou.com (via FriendFeed) http://bit.ly/RIb8u
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Liked “First Impressions: BackType Connect WP Plugin” http://ff.im/-227Wf
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Liked “First Impressions: BackType Connect WP Plugin” http://ff.im/-227Wf
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Thanks for finding this example of the BackType Connect plugin. I was thinking of installing it on my blog soon, seems to mostly work, though there are clearly still some improvements to be made. BTW, my "Like" of this entry just showed up on the blog post (via my FF to Twitter forwarding, as a Twitter "comment") in under 5 minutes, which really shows the potential this has.
This comment was originally posted on FriendFeed
Alex: let me know how it goes. We’ve already received lots of feedback on what to improve with the next release, looking fwd to hearing yours.
This comment was originally posted on FriendFeed
Any thoughts on a movable type plugin?
This comment was originally posted on Hacker News
We’re definitely looking at all publishing platforms, Wordpress just being the first.In the meantime, there’s a great button you can add to your site (courtesy of ConvoTrack) that, when clicked, will show related comments:
http://convotrack.com/
This comment was originally posted on Hacker News
And we’re definitely looking to add more filters e.g. removing "Likes" that make it to Twitter
This comment was originally posted on FriendFeed
And we’re definitely looking to add more filters in the next version e.g. removing "Likes" that make it to Twitter
This comment was originally posted on FriendFeed
if I comment on other peoples blogs, will all my comments made on all those other blogs show up in my lifestream WP blog using this plugin?
This comment was originally posted on FriendFeed
TrafficBug: I think what you’re looking for is the My Comments Elsewhere plugin, made by Wesley over at improvingthweb.com: http://www.improvingtheweb.com/wordpress-plugins/my-comments-elsewhere/ (also uses the BT API)
This comment was originally posted on FriendFeed
That is an interesting option but after looking at convotrack I think I will just wait for MovableType to be supported.I really don’t like the hovering javascript buttons and I think the side panel is is kind of a distracting option. It doesn’t feel well integrated allowing the comments to flow naturally as if they are just a part of the blog comment system.
Thanks for the link though.
This comment was originally posted on Hacker News
BackType Connect WP Plugin is nice, especially if you have readers everywhere @Stammy http://tinyurl.com/cobumm
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
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