BackType, a Y Combinator startup that launched in August, is a sort of “Twitter for comments” that aggregates comments from millions of blogs into a single, searchable, parsable stream.
Today they launched a new feature called Alerts that will let users track keywords included in comments on tracked blogs – a sort of Google Alerts for blog comments.
This will be useful to anyone who likes to track what’s being said about them, their companies or their brands online. Google Alerts only show keywords that are in the main text of articles or stories, and sometimes only catches keywords when they are included in titles of stories. BackType gives users another level of information.
For now alerts can be tracked on the site’s dashboard or via email delivered daily, weekly or whenever a new one pops up.
This should give those of you anxiously awaiting the return of Twitter Track, which does the same thing for Twitter messages, something to play with in the meantime.
They also launched a new feature today called Subscriptions, which allow users to track comments on any blog post. Many blogs already have a built in feature that emails readers when a new comment is left on a post to let them keep up with the discussion. BackType now allows people to duplicate the feature for blogs that don’t have it.