Conversations around blog posts now often happen offsite on social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Sadly, a lot of plugins that try to bring these conversation back to the blog end up being somewhat useless, as large numbers of retweets can easily overshadow the more interesting tweets. Twitter search engine BackType just launched a major update to its search engine and a new WordPress plugin that aim to combat this problem. Starting today, BackType will filter out uninteresting tweets from its search results and its widgets.
Widgets and Plugins
Last April, BackType released its first WordPress plugin. Unlike the original plugin, which features comments from sources like Twitter, Digg, FriendFeed,Reddit and other blogs, the new plugin only focuses on Twitter.
Installing the plugin is straightforward. If you use WordPress, you can find the plugin and instructions for installing it here. If you use another blog engine, the widget can be found here. You don’t need to register with BackType to use this service.
If nobody has tweeted anything interesting about your site yet, BackType will give your readers the option to send a tweet right from the widget. Sadly, BackType didn’t integrate a re-tweet feature into the plugin, which would have made the service even more useful for publishers.
Here is the new BackType widget in action:
BackType is obviously working in a crowded market. As a search engine, it has to compete with successful startups like OneRiot, while its plugin competes with more complete offerings from Disqus and JS-Kit. At the same time, though, the simplicity of the plugin is its greatest strength. If you don’t want to replace your current comment system but would like to bring in more discussions from Twitter to your blog, the new BackType plugin is definitely worth a look.
