Twitter Acquires Analytics Company Backtype

Frank Gruber July 5, 2011 Tweet

Twitter has acquired BackType a dashboard for analytically tracking Twitter reach and audience. Backtype’s team and technology will join Twitter to develop tools for Twitter’s publisher partners. Terms of the acquisition have not been disclosed.

BackType raised just over $1 million in funding from Y Combinator, True Ventures, K9 Ventures, Freestyle Capital, Lowercase Capital, 500 Startups, Founder Collective, Raymond Tonsing, and a few others.

BackType is the maker of BackTweets, a Twitter analytics dashboard which tracks links to Tweets and makes it easy to discover who was talking about a specific URL. It’s been particularly useful in products like Chartbeat, which allows you to see real-time traffic to your sites, and who’s Tweets have helped drive that traffic. BackType also offers a popular WordPress plug-in that incorporates the conversations that are happening around a particular piece of content on the Web, back into the WordPress post itself – similar to an old-school trackback (for anyone following along since 2005 when trackbacks were hot). They’ve announced that the BackTweets product will now be offered to current users for free but they will not be accepting any new registrations for BackTweets. They also stated that they will be discontinuing the BackType product and API services. We’re guessing the Backtype Connect WordPress plugin may be toast too, unless Twitter comes up with a new commenting system for blog platforms, which would make sense as Facebook currently has a commenting offering out there.