I agree w/ @Keren: Third party comment systems like Disqus definitely help limit spam and impersonation. They authenticate the comment author’s identity for us; we’re going to use that to our advantage. They’ve built a great product and we’re happy to support it on BackType.

Thanks for the comments.

I started thinking about this problem and I would like to suggest a couple potential solutions . Backtype could find one of the newly comment “hosting” services out there to co-operate with. The first that comes to mind is the new FriendFeed plugin for comments, the second is DISQUS (http://disqus.com/).
I’m not sure if this is a valid possibility since they might be competing solution. Yet getting comments from blogs that guarantee its reader’s identity is a more scalable solution.

Backtype could also offer its service in two modes: the first is the “wild west” mode where there is no comment governance. The second is the “spam free” service in the same way Twingly does for its blog search. In this mode only comments that has a valid web presence behind them (i.e. link to a blog from a “white list” – not splog) will be crawled.

If you think about it takes time to earn Google’s crawler trust and respect. Why not act the same way here?

Interesting discussion – thanks for bringing this point I encourage you and Christopher to share more thoughts here or on Backtype’s blog.

Regards,
Keren

The problem with Backtype does not actually derive from the service itself (you guys have actually done an awesome job), but rather from the fundamental way in which online personas are built. Impersonation is so ridiculously easy that it’s not even funny anymore.

Any attempt to bypass this problem creates another one. If you allow self moderation on a Backtype account, people will have a mean to get away with low quality comments and if you use the community to gauge whether a comment is real or not, you’ll find yourself in a “What height does the emperor of Japan has” conundrum.

Personally, I believe that the answer relies in the general spreading of systems such as OpenID, but until this occurs I have a strong feeling that we will witness a high profile case of this type of identity theft.

I know that Backtype tries to offer a valuable service in an imperfect world, but these concerns must be addressed sooner rather than later. The only real solution I see for the current situation is to simply drop this “comment belongs/ does not belong” paradigm and in unclear situations simply assign a probability for that comment to be real and state it as such. In murky waters, transparency is the best weapon.

Regards, George

Not sure what you meant re RSS — we offer an RSS feed for most followed people, as well as individuals’ comments and shared comments.

We will be adding search support for strings starting w/ @, $, #, etc. Being able to bring @replies to a users attention would be great.

Thanks for the suggestions for our API. We like what Gnip’s doing and are interested in becoming one of the “Data Producers”.

We’d really appreciate it if you sent us an e-mail when you have any more feedback.

Thanks,
CG

@Christopher Golda,
Thanks for stopping by. The obvious features that I can see missing today (and you probably already heard that from the community) are more views: all comments on [my blog, blogger X, maybe blog network Y – not sure about the need for that but I do see an up trend for blogging in groups).
Also, providing RSS feed subscription not just to the most popular people: http://feeds.backtype.com/people.
For the non obvious feature I promise to ping you when I’ll think of something.

You may want to consider using tags or #hashtags for grouping/sorting comments (discussions).
I do like to see relationships popping up from this service – to be able to encourage the creation of new ones (“people you may know”), to expose others, sentiment? (fans vs. haters).

Btw, before opening your API I recommend looking at both Gnip and Mashery for scalability. I believe that you want to focus on your core value proposition and not writing blog posts apologizing for the down time:)

Good luck,
Keren

@keren: Thanks for the post — great review of the less obvious features and implications of BT. We believe those are sometimes the most interesting e.g. content discovery, boosting the incentive to write good comments, etc. We’ve definitely been thinking about the implicit connections between comment authors and bloggers; we should be exploring that soon. Feel free to shoot me an e-mail if you have some more ideas @ cg [at] backtype [dot] com

Thanks for your interest.

@pressreleasepr: Thanks for the comment. We’re going to be developing more tools for businesses in the future. Contact me if there are things you’d like to see included.

P.S. The API is coming soon

Firstly, thanks for the mention – I feel suitably honored and humbled!

Backtype offers a great amount of potential for all bloggers – casual, hobbyist and professional. For the casual blogger it could simply be a way of finding new friends to discuss similar interests.

For professional and corporate bloggers, its benefits are two-fold, as far as I can see. Yes, it will be a great tool to find people or other businesses that might benefit from your services. However, it also offers a far greater and more powerful tool – the ability to gauge the true worth of your business or brand online.

Imagine if you can set up Backtype to just monitor the comments relating to your business, new product, service or similar? Imagine the tool you would have to instantly react to something being said about you? Adding to positive feedback, reacting and managing negative feedback?

As a business owner myself, especially one in the field I’m in, I can see Backtype as having the potential to be one of the most powerful tools around so far in the social media armory of businesses.

Now excuse me while I go wait for THIS comment to appear on Backtype…