BackType Aggregates Comments from Social Voting Sites in Addition to Blogs Only

There’s a nice little announcement from the blog comments aggregating service BackType that I thought is worth mentioning here as I know that many of the Profy readers have already grown accustomed to using BackType to track comments on the topics they are interested in or from the people they want to hear opinions from.

Basically BackType serves as an aggregator of comments from a variety of blogs - both standalone and published on multiple blogging platforms - for every commentator based on the URL he or she uses when submitting comments. The idea is that you can both track comments from specific people you are interested in - hence discovering new content via their comments - and also comments mentioning specific terms you want to track. You can find more about BackType in our initial review here.

Until now BackType was focused on comments people submit to blog posts only and today’s announcement definitely marks an interesting stage in the startup’s life as they add two major social voting sites - Digg and Reddit - and aggregate comments people write on posts and articles submitted to these sites as well.

Every user who has an account on BackType can add Digg and Reddit usernames to this account to aggregate the comments from these two sites to the profile on BackType as well. But unlike comments on blogs where you can find all the aggregated comments even if the authors don’t have accounts with BackType yet themselves, comments from Digg and Reddit will only be aggregated for the usernames existing users add to their accounts. This is quite wise in terms of avoiding cluttering the service but can be viewed as a limitation since we consider BackType as a service aggregating absolutely everything. (UPDATE: BackType actually aggregates all the comments from Digg and Reddit, not only those from BackType users but there will be functionality to sort out comments from these sites not to clutter one’s experience on BackType.)

At the same time the major advantage is obvious here as you will be able to track any subject you are interested in mentioned everywhere and not only in comments on blogs (provided that the comments from the people discussing it are aggregated to BackType). Besides, BackType adds another layer to discovery of new content your friends are interested in as when they actually bother to comment on Digg or Reddit it must mean they are very much interested - same as when you see their comments from these sites aggregated on FriendFeed.

The team is now accepting suggestions for other services to be supported next. My immediate suggestion is obviously FriendFeed but all in all this first step makes BackType an even more powerful tool for research of public opinion if you believe that comments can add many important aspects to any discussion in addition to the content itself. I myself already use BackType to research what people say about different subjects quite a lot for my posts here and I’m definitely more than happy to see this new feature introduced.

You can follow my comments on BackType here.