Alternatively, you can follow @hypem for tweets of the hottest songs.

Are you developing an application that could benefit from BackType’s API? We’d love to talk to you.

Tweetcount has a couple of advantages over Tweetmeme’s button:

Awe.sm Integration & Analytics

Our plugin and widget both allow you to specify your own awe.sm-powered URL shortener for links in retweets. Not only does that let you “brand” your links, but it also gives you access to full clickstream data and the ability to pull stats into Google Analytics automagically with GA Tracking Parameters.

Tweetcount defaults to our own awe.sm-powered shortener, bt.io

Customization

Specifying the button’s colors is the first of many features that will allow you to customize the button. More generally, we’ll be very flexible with attribution, linking and customization, starting with button colors and the tweets your readers send out.

Check out our other plugins and widgets

BackTweets lets you search for links on Twitter. Searching with keywords will match any URL they’re used in; full URLs will help track links to articles, blog posts, videos and whatever else you’re interested in.

Now you can add alerts for the searches you’re following and receive updates via e-mail. Like BackType Alerts, you can set your emails to be delivered immediately, daily, or once a week.

Are there any features you’d like to see in BackTweets? Please let us know in the comments!

Over the last few days, we have been fortunate enough to test the plugin out ourselves and can say with all honestly – it rocks. Once installed, you’ll immediately notice comments from services such as Twitter, Digg, Friendfeed and many many more appearing alongside regular comments on your blog.

—Zee, The Next Web

We’re going to continue to strive to connect conversations in near real-time; we thank Zee again for all his help during the final testing of our plugin.

But BackType Connect has some weaknesses that will likely keep larger blogs from using it for now. For one, some of the sources (especially Twitter) can be very spammy. Blog admins can pick and choose which services they’d like to include, but it looks like the filters for services that are enabled need some work [...] There’s also apparently no way to preserve the original comment threads when importing them, which can make some comments appear totally out of context.

—Jason Kincaid, TechCrunch

In addition to our plugin’s support for Akismet and Wordpress’ native comment moderation, we’re going to develop better filters for your sources. Currently we have one: the ability to filter out retweets. Also, we’re going to work to preserve threaded conversations both in BackType and the Connect Wordpress plugin. This was some great feedback; unfortunately, we couldn’t get these features included in our first release.

I get to keep all my comments on my blog and there are no third party sites that my readers must consider, in addition to my other comment features (Facebook Connect, etc.). While I am an early adopter and I cover alot of social web technology, I know my audience enough to know that most are not as tech-savvy and the easier it is for them to engage and comment, the better.

—Maria Reyes-McDavis, Web Success Diva

This is more related to Wordpress’ native comment system rather than our plugin, but it’s nice to know that we can help promote engagement among the less tech-savvy!

See what people are saying about the plugin on Twitter or BackType; we’re looking forward to getting more of your feedback in the comments!

Filtrbox G2 delivers critical market intelligence to executives, sales professionals, investors and marketers. The service acts as an intelligent agent, discovering new articles across millions of online sources and delivering a daily list of qualified results based on your business logic. With Filtrbox G2 you will spend less time searching and more time making the critical decisions to make your business successful.

This is a win for our customers, said Ari Newman, President of Filtrbox, Inc. Partnering with BackType extends our reach into conversational media and allows Filtrbox to deliver even more coverage and quality. Conversations that may impact your business are happening on websites you’ve never heard of, every day. The combination of Filtrbox and BackType means our customers are always one step ahead. added Newman.

Existing Filtrbox customers will have access to the new feature in Filtrbox G2 today. If you’re interested in trying Filtrbox for the first time, sign up for a free 14 day trial on their website.

ConvoTrack lets you view all the conversation surrounding a particular page as you browse it, through the service or a bookmarklet that’s offered. It also lets you shorten URLs that preload the accompanying conversation so you can post them to Twitter. Additionally, bloggers can place a small button on their websites that, when clicked, will show related comments from other blogs, Twitter, FriendFeed, Digg, Reddit, and more.

You can read more about ConvoTrack around the web:

• ConvoTrack: A Simple And Useful Conversation Tracker Built On Top Of BackType
• ConvoTrack: An Easy Way to Get the Web Pulse on Content You Read

Following our API update last week, today we’re releasing the BackType Connect Plugin for Wordpress. It brings the functionality of BackType Connect to the Wordpress comment system, showing conversations from other blogs, Twitter, FriendFeed, Digg, Reddit and more inline with the comments on your blog. Existing conversations about your content taking place across the web can now be displayed right on your blog for your visitors to read and respond to.

Click here for for installation instructions and a link to download.

Features

• Specify which sources you want to include comments from
• Add a summary to the top of your comments section, which shows the number of comments from each source
• Specify whether you would like BackType Connect comments to be displayed at the end of the comments section, or mixed with the rest of your comments
• The plugin works on top of your existing Wordpress comments, both threaded and non-threaded, and can work with other comment-related plugins

Sources

We import conversations from the following sources:

• Other Blogs – whenever someone comments on a post that links to one of yours
• Twitter – whenever someone tweets one of your posts
• FriendFeed – whenever someone comments on an entry for one of your posts
• Digg – whenever someone comments on a submission for one of your posts
• Reddit – whenever someone comments on a submission for one of your posts
• Hacker News – whenever someone comments on a submission for one of your posts
• And more

Let us know what you think – we’re gathering feedback for the next release.

Special thanks to Wesley from ImprovingTheWeb and Zee from WeDoCreative!

To kick things off, we created a BackType Connect Wordpress plugin that we’ll be releasing shortly. It’s running in the comments section right here on our blog, powered by our API. On every post, we pull in comments from other blogs, Twitter, Digg, Reddit, FriendFeed and more and display them inline with our own comments. You can even reply to the comments using Wordpress’ native comment system. More on that soon.

Let us know what you think. More updates coming next week