BackType – a New Model of Handling Blog Comments
by
on August 28, 2008,
We have already seen enough competition (I think) between services intended to help blog readers easier authenticate themselves to leave a comment on a blog and have all the comments from blogs supporting this or that service aggregated into one account: Disqus, SezWho, JS-Kit, IntenseDebate all work in the same field with slight variations of approaches. But unfortunately as blog owners choose different services to install on their blogs, readers end up creating accounts with each of the services.
Today we have a very different approach to comments aggregation introduced by a new YCombinator startup BackType. Michael Arrington quickly labeled the startup a “Twitter for Comments” and there are some similarities here, like following and tracking people - but here tracking is only for blog comments. Besides, comment authors don’t even have to have accounts with BackType for you to track their comments since the service aggregates all comments from the blogs it crawls. The service operates by identifying blog comments and pulling them into their system, no matter where this or that particular comment is left. The most important thing is that blogs don’t have to install anything to have their comments aggregated by BackType.
Any particular commentator can choose to claim his or her identity so that all the comments left on blogs using this or that URL (and every user can actually have multiple URLs in the system) will be aggregated as belonging to one user. There is also an option to use comments moderation in order to prevent comments left by some strangers using your blog’s or site’s URL appearing as yours (and even without moderation you can always remove comments as not belonging to your stream in one click).
Same as you do on Twitter you can both follow and be followed here - other users will quickly see stats on your individual page while you will be able to track all the comments the people you follow leave around the blogosphere in one place. A good addition is that the service actually shows statistics on the most commented blogs for every user so it will show us what blogs people we are interested in pay the most attention to.
But as for any new application there are some problems here as well. First of all, I don’t really understand why we are talking today about BackType as offering something truly unique and innovative while coComment has been doing a very similar thing for a while now. The only difference between the two is that coComment needs a user to have a browser plug-in installed to be able to identify and track comments while BackType does not rely on any installations at all. But for some reason coComment has been almost forgotten and I have personally encountered multiple glitches with the service (which has been one of my favorites for a long time) and the experience has definitely been spoiled to a certain extent. And the difference in its approach will obviously allow BackType to aggregate much more content compared to coComment. There must be some infrastructural and scalability issues with crawling and handling this immense volume of content generated by blog readers but I hope they will be addressed properly.
Another problem seems to be in the number of blogs BackType crawls as I have already seen complains from people that are not able to see the comments they leave on some smaller blogs. Besides, the service makes a difference between various URL types so if I comment with the URL http://profy.com and have http://www.profy.com submitted to BackTypem this comment will not show so I’ll have to have both URLs enabled.
Another problem related to identifying users is the fact that they only use URLs to identify a commentator while services like Gravatar, for example, use URLs and emails to provide an avatar for your comment on some blog supporting it. In fact, I believe an email could actually be a better identifier since I tend to use different URLs quite often for comments (like when I want to show some link behind my name but don’t want to include it in the comment itself) while I stick to only one email. This could very well result in strange results for multi-author blogs when multiple editors will leave comments across the blogosphere and they will all be aggregated into one account if they all use one URL.
Another thing I am not comfortable is the way this new startup treats its users and offers preferential conditions to A-listers as we often see elsewhere. What you see on the homepage is a list of “highlights” - some of the most popular recent comments to show activity around. I have not been able to find exactly how the popularity of comments is determined since there are no ratings for comments but I believe it is based on the number of people that choose to “share” comments on their own feeds.
But what’s disturbing is that for some reason the most popular comments all come from the usual people in the notorious A-list (even those that are known to rarely or never comment on other people’s blogs). It is understandable that every service launched seems to desperately want to show the most prominent online personalities that they can get some extra visibility and exposure from their service as well but I still don’t think it is fair to other users, especially since the majority of people those most popular comments arrived from have not even claimed their comments on BackType yet.
This will probably only get worse by offering more and more exposure to already the most followed people since the only thing you get when you go to the “People” tab (unless you do a search for a user based on his or her name) is the list of the most followed users with a “follow” button for every such user so that the already popular users will become more and more popular.
And finally I have encountered one difficulty with the service interface. I honestly fail to understand why the “Comments” tab shows me the most popular comments among the service users instead of comments from the people that I have declared myself interested in by following them? I may be not intelligent enough for BackType but it has actually taken me some time to figure out that the comments from those people I follow can actually be easily found right there in my dashboard. The thing is that dashboard is associated to me with something related to me personally (like editing my account) and I actually expect to find comments (I’m here for them, after all) right there in the “Comments” tab - even though there may be an option to view the most popular ones along with those from people I’m subscribed to.
But anyway even with these issues the startup really looks promising so I hope they will be able to further elaborate it based on what they hear from bloggers on the launch date. One potential application for such a service is to track the brands or products you are interested in using search - those can be brands that you either own or promote as a marketer. Another thing is that BackType can help you find and join discussions you will really be interested in, especially if you dislike being the first to leave a comment on a post: you will always be able to search for a topic you are interested in, subscribe to it via RSS and join some discussions on blog posts as soon as you get your notifications. Another way to use the service for every FriendFeed addict is to use it as another source service using the RSS feed for your own comments so that it could fetch all the comments to the aggregator, even if otherwise your followers could have missed those little gems of your thoughts.
Of course we’ll have to wait and see if the service gains traction but I can see enough potential in it and I’ll be sure to use it myself to track some discussions I might be interested in joining myself. You can follow me at http://www.backtype.com/profy, of course.
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Svetlana Gladkova
Opensource 
Michael Fidler 
Interesting article indeed !
One thing I do not get with Backtype:
If I understand well the model, they crawl “some” blogs and will assign the comment to you if you put your URL inside your comment.
Now, this mean you cannot choose yourself which blog should be crawled, like coComment is doing.
At the end, even if coComment is having sometimes some troubles to track a specific blog, I have the feeling it will still track more of your conversations than BlackType is capable of.
Regarding the issue of installing or not an extension: I guess that if you want to use coComment, installing it is not an issue. And coComment does not limit the tracking of comments to only those made by coComment users as it is also crawling comments made by other users.
So I still think that coComment have globally the advantage of:
- You choose which conversation is tracked by coComment
- You do not have to enter a specific URL in the comment for it to be yours.
And, by the way, Disqus, IntenseDebate and JS-Kit track conversations only if they power it them self (the blog itself have to integrate the service): even more limited than BlackType in term of your ability to decide which conversation you want to participate and track.
This is a very comprehensive review! I’ll do my best to respond to your concerns:
Re scaling: We’re going to working very hard to improve the quality of our service.
Re missing comments: We are adding blogs to BackType every single day. We’re going to release a feature that makes it very easy for our users to tell us where they comment.
Re URLs: Technically, if you’re only given two URLs, http://www.profy.com and http://profy.com (and nothing else), you can’t conclude that they’re the same website. We will work in a solution for this soon.
Re A-list: This was very much a temporary solution for our launch. Eventually, we will switch it over to a public timeline of user comments. We definitely want to reward people that write insightful and interesting comments; BackType has helped us find great comment authors that aren’t “A-list” bloggers, etc.
Thanks,
Christopher Golda
Founder, BackType
Hi all,
Yes, it is true that sometime we (coComment) have troubles to crawl a specific blog. This happen mainly if the blog is not using a standard platform, or a very customized template that remove all the HTML elements that helps us to identify what is a comment and what is not (actually, we have seen some cases where the comment list, from an HTML code point of view, really looked like some other lists in the blog sidebar…. tough…..
However, we are currently testing a brand new crawler based on very advanced technologies that will help to find comments even in the most “unreadable” page
Also, our integration team (integration_AT_cocomment.com) is always here to help you if you have some issues in tracking some specific conversations. We do make a point to answer to all the requests we receive.
@MntRider: True, with BackType as a commentator you won’t be able to determine if you want your comments crawled or not if you leave a comment on crawled blog – and this has already raised questions from users. Though I believe they have quite a valid argument that the comments are visible to everyone anyway – and they simply aggregate already visible comments into one place.
But since they don’t require users to register or install anything for their comments to be aggregated, they will be sure to aggregate much more comments than coComment ever could. BackType is only limited with the number of blogs they add – this is why I think they have a good potential.
And I have never compared BackType or coComment with installed comments handling services like Disqus, by the way.
@CG: Christopher, thank you for the comment and explaining your future plans for BackType.
I am mostly interested in the question with URLs and it’s good to know you are looking into a solution for the problem. I believe that a perfect arrangement could be to add some “variables” so that I could simply use *profy.com/* and everything that contains profy.com in the URL will be considered as my comment.
And I already have noticed today that you added paging to the list of users so that we could see more people on the service, not only the most popular ones. It will be perfect to have a public timeline and probably some other ways to discover other users, great that you are working on it.
Keep up the great work!
@christophe: Thanks for the update on your own plans, it will be very interesting to see what you come up with so do please keep me updated, I’ll be happy to cover your news as well.
But actually the glitches I referred to in the post were actually not about blogs on some non-standard platforms but instead about inability to communicate properly with your servers when trying to leave a comment myself so I often have to cancel such comments and submit to the blog directly (which will leave my coComment account without this comment).
Svetlana,
Great piece. Much better coverage than provided by the other “A-listers”
What BackType is doing is interesting, although what immediately strikes me are two issues: First, as you point out, aggregating comments based on url is a problem. Typically all writers on a site will provide the same url resulting in all authors on a given site aggregated to a single source. Second, if I’m interested in a particular contributor what I ideally would like to see is an aggregation of all of their contributions - posts, forum, wiki contributions, shared pictures, video, etc., not just blog comments.
@tedd
It’s true that people often comment with the same URL as one another, typically people with companies or blogs with multiple authors, etc. We’ll be looking into a solution for it, but it’s not one of our top priorities.
The second thing you’re interested in is already solved by FriendFeed. BackType is going to explore comments exclusively for now; that includes blog comments and comments on other services.
@svetlana: Actually our plan is to improve our crawler. But we already have one scanning millions of blogs. What we want to improve is the quality of scanning on non standard platform.
If you still encounter some issues while submitting a comment, do not hesitate to contact us with the post URL you want to comment on.
@tedd corman: Thank you for the comment, glad you’ve enjoyed the coverage
I think the guys behind BackType have already realized the issue with multi-author blog since many of us have pointed that out. I myself spent quite some time removing comments from other Profy bloggers from my own stream. I hope they will find some additional means to identify a person with a comment besides the URL.
As for the second issue you mention, I actually feel it’s quite enough for me to get all the information aggregated by services like FriendFeed - and the easiest way for BackType to be useful is to be integrated efficiently into FriendFeed, that will certainly make sense.
@christophe: Thank you for the clarification, this direction certainly makes sense. As for the blogs I experience problems with, most often I have troubles when commenting on Profy itself - as this is the blog I comment on the most. I’ll be sure to send a URL your way next time.
@светлана: Thanks for your help. When you say it does not work: does that mean that your comment is not sent to coComment, or that you are not notified when a new comment is entered on your blog ?
Very interested article. You have talant of a writer.
@christophe: It actually means that it takes so long sending a comment to coComment server that I eventually choose to “cancel and submit to blog” – it happens for at least every third comment.
On a side note, how comes you know how my name is spelled in Russian?
Thanks for the details. We will looks at fix it ASAP.
re Russian: I’m trying to learn it as our tech team is based in Kiev and I’m spending quite some of my time there. But I must admit I’m not gifted for learning languages
@christophe: Glad to see you are paying attention to the issues bloggers have with coComment. I did not know you had a development team in Kiev, it is always a pleasure for me when I see anyone even attempting to learn some Russian – I know what a difficult language my native one is so I can’t help but admire all the brave ones
http://www.commentino.com/