[ehsanul]

This reminds me of that post by the ex-Facebook manager, who said that tools are top priority. This article really brings it home for me.

However, despite their purported effectiveness as engineers, I'm not sure what Backtype is really doing. I generally see them just below an article, in place of comments, with a long list of useless tweets referring to the article (usually of the form "article title - bit.ly/shortened". That's probably not doing them too much good for marketing, unless you think any publicity is good publicity.

[konsl]

What you're seeing is Disqus' Reactions feature, which we help power. Part of our business is data services, which companies like Disqus, Bitly, The New York Times, SlideShare, etc use.

Our own product is a marketing intelligence platform; essentially, it provides analytics for social media marketing programs so brands understand what's working, what isn't and how to improve.

[blasdel]

I remember when they first launched, Backtype seemed like something I had been looking for — a way to automatically aggregate and archive the comments I've posted on various blogs and such. I spent some time getting increasingly frustrated trying to use their webapp when I realized I had apparently misunderstood the purpose of their indexing — they were actually reinventing the trackback.