konsl

We've released open source projects (most notably ElephantDB and Cascalog) in the past that are successfully used in production by us as well as other companies. You should check them out if you're interested in a measure of quality, though I understand your concern.

We're a startup — we're not going to write an academic paper supporting the claims in the post. Nevertheless, Storm's an exciting project many people are curious to learn more about; that's why we've written something about it now.

We have a demo coming soon, and Storm itself will be open sourced soon enough.

wtf.

Here's an example (or you can click usernames on the frontpage): http://cl.ly/232U2o2t0C2y3V0J0r10

Since we're using BackType as well to calculate the score, it was easier to do both requests server-side. We pre-ran a long list of popular users and all of their followers, but guess we didn't reach enough people :(

If you leave the tab open, it will finish.

The score's based on your use of GitHub, who follows you and your projects, as well as (this is where BackType comes in) how much they are shared on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Hacker News, etc.

Thanks!

The results in BackTweets haven't actually changed, we're just showing an upgrade button above them. What was free continues to be free.

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.

Many startups are C corporations which typically do not have a sole "owner" i.e. I'm an owner of BackType, I'm also an owner of Google if I buy their stock, etc.

Essentially, it's up to the immigration offer to decide whether a certain level of equity disqualifies you from receiving TN status. Much more scrutiny is applied to the actual proposed employment, your responsibilities, whether these fit in the TN status categories, etc.

The TN is obviously not intended for self employment, but that becomes subjective once you've grown beyond a company of size one.

Identifying influencers is important, but that's not the sole feature of our product. We already differentiate ourselves with other features (which Klout et al. don't offer): visit backtype.com and try it out. Thousands of people use it every day.

Thanks — will add these soon

Aware of this, just less common. Usually startup founders don't have money of their own to make a "substantial investment." It's my understanding that the investment should exceed $200,000 USD, and some consulates require $500,000. The amount is also evaluated based on the type of business being invested in, etc.

We (BackType) don't power Tweetmeme's button — we offer our own, more accurate one. The counts we do are also available via our API, which powers Posterous' button.

BackType is looking for interns (San Francisco): http://backtype.theresumator.com/apply/F38wS3/

More info here: http://www.backtype.com/jobs

BackType is hiring developers to join the founding team of two in San Francisco:

http://www.backtype.com/jobs

It's a (lame) joke, but who knows, maybe it will result in greater than 12.81% clickthrough :)

http://dustincurtis.com/you_should_follow_me_on_twitter.html

If you don't know what to do if you aren't accepted, you shouldn't be applying in the first place.

We (BackType) are looking for an engineer to join the founding team:

http://backtype.theresumator.com/apply/DNFiF7/

We (BackType) track hundreds of thousands of blogs, as well as sites like HN, digg, reddit, etc. In addition to claiming your comments, you can use BackType Subscriptions to follow activity on the posts you contribute to. There's also an option to auto-subscribe:

http://www.backtype.com/

We're definitely looking at all publishing platforms, Wordpress just being the first.

In the meantime, there's a great button you can add to your site (courtesy of ConvoTrack) that, when clicked, will show related comments:

http://convotrack.com/

I'd agree that sometimes the comments don't work - that's why we let you control which sources you want to display.

Regarding replies to comments: I'm not too concerned. People who write entire articles often don't see the responding conversation that happens on Hacker News. Conversations are fragmenting. Lots of people use plugins to pull in tweets and FriendFeed comments, so we thought we could give them all in one.

Regarding grouping: We have an option to push all the comments to the end of the comment section, but we don't group them distinctly right now. We want to do that in our next release.

Thanks for the feedback!

Unfortunately they don't work together. If you use our plugin with Disqus enabled, it will just show the "Summary" of activity above the comment section.

Disqus has their own "Social Media Comments" you might want to look into.

The plugin works with Hacker News comments too - this conversation will be mirrored on our blog

More info: http://www.backtype.com/plugins/connect

We're definitely going to have this available through the API, so look out for our release.

In addition to Digg, Reddit and Hacker News, we're looking at other blogs as well as FriendFeed and Twitter.

I was quoted in the article saying that we're working on it. In fact, we could release comments from originating source, Digg, Reddit and Hacker News right now, but we'd like to include more than that. Very few conversations extend to Digg, Reddit and Hacker News.

It will be available in a few different ways, including what you mentioned (entering a URL and seeing the "conversational graph").

We're open to more suggestions -- thanks for the feedback!

Great job Garry, Sachin. I'm playing with it now :)

Alternatively, you could use BackType Subscriptions to do this, as well as follow threads you're not participating in:

http://www.backtype.com/subscriptions

We have a bookmarklet too -- so adding subscriptions can be less painful.

According to Dave McClure, they are going to pull in > $270M in revenue for 2008:

http://www.backtype.com/url/500hats.typepad.com/comment/1909...

Not sure how much they need to become profitable.

I thought you were BackType Alerts' #1 Fan ;(