BackType is the newest YCombinator startup to launch from their summer program. They’re a blog-comment focused startup – founders Christoper Golda and Michael Montano are for the first time aggregating all comments from millions of blogs into a single, searchable, parsable stream. Think Twitter for all comments on the web.
They are not like the recent barrage of startups focusing on cleaning up the comment experience on blogs – see Disqus, SezWho, JS-Kit, etc. Blogs (and even commenters) don’t have to actively participate to be included. Instead BackType is grabbing all comments from millions of blogs (via feeds and scraping) and adding them to the site.
Like Twitter it’s a gold mine of information. I tried searches for TechCrunch50, Obama and Olympics and got back all kinds of content that I would normally miss. RSS feeds for searches are also available.
You can also track by commenter. BackType aggregates comments made by a name that matches to a linked URL. So if you, like most people, leave comments with the same URL across multiple blogs, they will be aggregated. You can also claim an account, like i did, and have your comments aggregated even if you use different URLs. Since there is not authentication other than what people type into comment boxes, there’s a big fake comment problem. That can be fixed by turning moderation on so that you have to approve anything that goes under your name.
I like this one a lot.