Improving The Web

About two weeks ago I created a new website: ConvoTrack.com.

This website offers a bookmarklet that, when installed, allows you to see the entire conversation surrounding a particular webpage at the press of a button. Comments from Twitter, FriendFeed, Digg, Reddit, HackerNews and any blog mentioning the article are loaded in a sidebar. This way, you can see comments that were never on the original site.

Additionally, you can send a link with the sidebar preloaded to people who don’t have the bookmarklet installed. Simply prepend “http://convotrack.com/” to any URL to do so.

Site integration

If you’d like to add this functionality to your own website, you can use the code found on ConvoTrack.com. This will add a button on the left side of your website that behaves exactly like the bookmarklet.

If you’re a wordpress user however, you may be interested in the more advanced Backtype Connect wordpress plugin. This plugin allows for a seamless integration of the outside comments in your own comment system.

How was it built?

BackType.com is the service that does all the heavy lifting. Using their newly released BackType connect API the bookmarklet queries for all comments pertaining to a particular URL and then outputs them in the sidebar. Very easy.

What’s coming?

A firefox extension should be released soon, this will allow you to have the sidebar visible at all times and will update the comments as you browse the web.

Suggestions?

If you have any suggestions for improvements, do tell.

BackType, as I’ve already explained in a previous post, is a comment aggregator. If you sign up, the service will track all the comments you make across the web.

BackType is infact a search engine. This means you don’t have to install any browser extensions or anything of the like to track your comments. The entire process is transparent and automated.

Using BackType’s API, I’ve created a wordpress plugin that lets you import your comments into your blog. On set intervals, (hourly, daily or weekly) the plugin will download your newest comments and add them to your database.

This is a great way to show your visitors what you’re doing on the web and find interesting. As an example, you can see my comments here.

In addition to the paginated listing of comments, a widget is also available for your sidebar. Lastly, you can set it up so that a digest of your latest comments is automatically posted either daily or weekly.

For more information and download instructions, go to the dedicated page: My Comments Elsewhere.

There’s been numerous times I wanted to continue to follow the comments made on specific blog posts.

If I was lucky, the blog owner had the Subscribe to comments Wordpress plugin installed. The problem is that only a small percentage of blogs actually do.

The solution?

Let BackType handle everything. BackType works across all blogs, be it Wordpress, MovableType, etc.. You simply install a bookmarklet in your browser and click on it whenever you’re on a page you want to follow.

You can then subscribe to a RSS feed that will update either in real time, once a day or once a week with the newest comments from blog posts you’re following.

Having the results returned as a RSS feed makes everything much easier to manage. The old Subscribe to comments plugin sends you a bunch of emails instead, cluttering your inbox. Secondly, everything is centralized at BackType. This ensures you can easily add or remove subscriptions in 1 place.

But that’s not the only service BackType provides

In fact, it’s core service is to track all comments across the web. These are then indexed and made searchable on their website. A wealth of knowledge is contained within.

The best part for me is being able to follow other people. For example, here is my profile. If you want to, you can follow me and from that point onwards you will see every comment I make. Very powerful. Here are some popular people.

There’s one other service; Alerts. Think Google Alerts, but for comments. Whenever the keywords you specify are in a comment, you’ll receive a notification.

Now, BackType is still a pretty young service, and if there’s one fault with BackType, it’s that their index is not complete. However, improvements are made daily. If you find your site is not yet added to the database, you can do so here.