Google Reader adds comments for sharing

March 12th, 2009 •
Tags: comment, comments, conversation, friendfeed, google reader, sharing, Social Web

This is a big deal for social web addicts. One of the first articles posted to this site was about the inadequacies of Google Reader as a sharing platform when compared to FriendFeed. Yesterday, one of FriendFeed‘s advantages over Google’s sharing platform was mitigated as Google unveiled comments for shared items. Google Reader makes it easy to share stories with friends, but it hasn’t fostered conversation around shared content. The best you could do is to either e-mail the sharer or re-share the item with a note containing your own comments. This new feature is a real breakthrough, and it’s something I know for a fact I will use every day. Now, if Google will only copy Gmail’s new label management system right on over to Google Reader…

Use Backtype to track your and your friends’ comments online

February 7th, 2009 •
Tags: backtype, blogs, commenting, comments, social networking, weblogs

For those of you who are active commenting on lots of blogs, Backtype is a wonderful service that tracks your commenting. Register an account and claim your comments on blogs and a number of other social sites. Backtype itself is a social network around your comments and the comments of friends. Follow people and have them follow you, and, when comments are posted by people you follow, you see it on your Backtype page.

You may know that WordPress blogs ask for your website URL. This is what Backtype uses to attach your comments to your profile. Tell Backtype any of the URLs you use when commenting. It will look at the indexed comments to find comments that are posted with your URLs which will then be attributed to you. If someone else starts posting with one of your URLs, you can mark them as “Fake” to remove the comments from your page. Comments on other services are a little more straightforward. You enter your username so there isn’t much guesswork to be done in attributing your comments.

A fantastic secondary feature is comment subscription. Some blogs (this one included) provide a means for users to subscribe to comments via e-mail. Unfortunately, many do not. Rather than depending on the blog owner to set this up, Backtype allows users to subscribe to any comments thread via bookmarklet.

Before the launch of this service, it was difficult to track this aspect of friends’ activity online. Now, all your comments can be shared and accessed as you wish. It makes it much easier to become involved in the discussions online your friends value. Online comments are, for the most part, very encapsulated and disconnected. Backtype unifies comments and makes them a part of the social online experience. It reorganizes comments around individuals rather than around the content that inspires them.

If you decide to try Backtype, follow me on the service. Also, if you like this post, subscribe to raddevon.com!