

BackType specializes in searching "the conversation," people (YC S08) - terpua
http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2009/02/backtype-specializes-in-searching-the-conversation-people.ars

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sam_in_nyc
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.

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konsl
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!

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sam_in_nyc
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?

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konsl
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.

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sam_in_nyc
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.

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ardell
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.

