If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or follow me on Twitter.
Contact me to talk about how I can help with your social & viral marketing. Thanks!
Update: I’ve released a TweetBacks WordPress Plugin that includes TweetBacks as a feature.
In response to a Mashable post about how Twitter will change blog design in 2009, yesterday I created Tweetbacks.
They work kind of like trackbacks, but instead of listing blogs linking to a specific post, it lists Tweets about a specific post. You can see it in action on my blog, just above the comments. It currently finds mentions of the URL through the top 5 most popular URL shorteners on Twitter: Tinyurl, Bit.ly, Is.gd, Twurl, and SnipURL. I used cli.gs’s list of top shorteners to prioritize. To prevent it from running afoul of Twitter’s search API rate limits it functions via javascript.
This is still in beta, but to install it all you have to do is include this line in your template where you want the Tweetbacks to appear:
<script src="http://danzarrella.com/tb.js"></script>
You can style how the list appears with CSS like this:
#tweetbacks {
font-size:12px;
}
#tweetbacks li {
padding-bottom:5px;
}
This tool (as well as my ReTweet mapper) are currently free, but they do use bandwidth and server processing time that I pay for. If you like my Tweetbacks tool, my ReTweet tools or the other work I do, consider donating to help pay for it:
January 6th, 2009 at 11:45 am
EXTREME INNOVATION.
Congrats.
BTW, why dont you release the scripts ?
Are we allowed to save and host the script on our hosts ?
January 6th, 2009 at 11:46 am
Dude, that’s awesome. What a great idea! Can’t wait to use it.
January 6th, 2009 at 11:51 am
Great idea, indeed! Any plans to release this as a wordpress plug-in?
January 6th, 2009 at 11:55 am
Dan,
Beta Feedback: looks like my TweetBack didn’t get picked up. http://twitter.com/johnfairley/status/1099676734
Note: The tweet uses: http://is.gd/eGo2 for the link to this blog post. The link was created using the PeopleBrowsr client’s URL shortner.
John
January 6th, 2009 at 11:56 am
Now this is cool!!!, great idea!, why cant I think of things like this?;))
January 6th, 2009 at 12:00 pm
Thanks Dan! You’re just a font of valuable knowledge and tools. I tweeted this page, so it should show up in the tweetbacks
January 6th, 2009 at 12:03 pm
Nicely done! I’ll be curious to watch the adoption curve, and hear what people say about functionality.
January 6th, 2009 at 12:03 pm
FYI, I tweeted it with bit.ly and it’s not showing up. You’re going to get a huge spike in traffic with this. Are you ready for it?
January 6th, 2009 at 12:33 pm
That’s a whole lot of screen that took up, though it does look good. My fantasy version of this script would start out collapsed, showing just the most recent and would allow blacklisting of certain twitter usernames. We get a lot of bots retweeting our stuff, for example.
January 6th, 2009 at 12:41 pm
Now this is a very good idea.
January 6th, 2009 at 12:44 pm
Dan, it would be really nice if the avatar linked directly to the Twitter home page of the tweetback poster. Since you already see the content of the tweet, there is no real value in linking to the original tweet url.
Congrats on a nice script.
January 6th, 2009 at 12:46 pm
Great idea, waiting for the script
January 6th, 2009 at 12:53 pm
Hi Dan,
What a cool tool. I’ll be playing around with it this week. Thanks for sharing!
January 6th, 2009 at 1:19 pm
I tried it and couldn’t get the tweetbacks to show. What is the refresh rate? Or is it that there are so many people trying it at once?
January 6th, 2009 at 1:24 pm
@ana and anyone else who tried this and had it not work, i had to fix a mistake i made, but it should work now
January 6th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
Very impressive. cool. No, wait….stunning. It must make a fantastic case study for you too
Matt
January 6th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
Looks so interesting! You have a very different mind.
If only I could install it without Wordpress stripping it out! Am I doing something wrong, trying to put it in the wrong place? (Tried to put it in the Text/HTML box they provide).
Pen
January 6th, 2009 at 2:14 pm
@penelope you have to put it in your template
January 6th, 2009 at 2:36 pm
Hey Dan,
this is genius. I’m trying to implement it on my blog. At best, I’m a cut and paste coder, so I’m trying to figure where in my blog (hosted, wordpress) I should put the script. I tried putting it in the CSS file, didn’t work. I tried putting it in the comments template, didn’t work.
Any thoughts?
January 6th, 2009 at 2:41 pm
Also, my templates are php, so I’m thinking I might need to know more than what I currently do to make this work.
If you have any thoughts, it’d be greatly appreciated. Hell of a great idea.
January 6th, 2009 at 3:55 pm
I gotta hand it to you man. Nice job on this one. This rocks.
January 6th, 2009 at 4:08 pm
This is an AMAZING innovation!! Wow, I can hardly wait to try it out! You’re a genius! Thanks!
January 6th, 2009 at 6:31 pm
WOW! - Fantastic! Will most certainly be giving you a donation - excellent work!
January 6th, 2009 at 6:42 pm
great job, man.
January 6th, 2009 at 7:41 pm
Excellent idea, only with so much tweets the page loads kind of slow, a possible solution would be to show X amount a tweetbacks per page, kind of like comments on WordPress 2.7.
Great work!
January 6th, 2009 at 7:59 pm
Hey Dan, great idea here! Though I put it on our blog, http://blog.pelotonics.com and it seemed to SLOW down the load of the page. Also, it would say like, “10 Tweetbacks” but nothing would show, or one one of our blog posts, it said, “4 Tweetbacks” and only 1 showed.
Any ideas?
thanks!!!
Daniel
January 6th, 2009 at 8:54 pm
Dan…amazing idea. This will help bring a good amount of freshness to my blog and I look forward in seeing if it has any traffic potential. Keep up the great work mate.
January 6th, 2009 at 9:16 pm
I think the URL should be automatically erased from the “tweetback”. It would make the tweet cleaner.
January 6th, 2009 at 9:40 pm
Great idea, Dan, and thanks for doing it.
If you’re taking requests, Marshall’s idea above about blocking users is smart. I’d also recommend an option to not show avatars. (Think how MyBlogLog lets you block avatars from showing in their widget.) I’m sure some Twitter users have avatars that I’d rather not see on my blogs.
January 6th, 2009 at 9:54 pm
Hi Dan,
First of all, belated Happy New Year wishes!
You have got a great idea and sure is awesome. People should definitely try it. And yes, I think some people have a valid point with regards to switching off the Twitter avatars.
Best Wishes,
Shinil.
@shinils on Twitter - http://twitter.com/shinils
January 7th, 2009 at 12:47 am
Very cool! I made my first ever online donation to a developer, and threw it on my site.
As others have noted, not all the RTs are getting picked up from the differet services. There is another service out there called ChatCatcher that I’d tried to implement, you may want to check that out as well, perhaps that would save some of the heavy lifting to implement other shorteners? (they also had a nice feature where you could exclude certain users, as Marshall mentioned).
I have both set up here: http://www.afhill.com/blog/social-media/twitter-phishing/#comments
January 7th, 2009 at 12:48 am
oh yeah and I forgot to mention that too: it shows 2 tweetbacks but says there are 8.. but there are also 6 comments on the page. Is there some funky math going on there?
January 7th, 2009 at 8:25 am
The future (and present, actually) of the social web will involve coordinating all of our various activities. I’m always on the lookout for ways to automate that cooperation, and this is a brilliant contribution.
January 7th, 2009 at 9:06 am
Thanks for tweetbacks. It’s awesome. I installed it this morning, and while the number of tweetbacks is displaying, the specific tweets underneath are not.
You can see it here: http://tumblelog.wick.me/post/68559188/david-lee-roths-vocal-track-for-runnin-with-the
January 7th, 2009 at 11:58 am
Amazing, its up and running at my blog now(url at my user name).
January 7th, 2009 at 1:51 pm
Hey Dan. Nice job!
I implemented the WP plugin at http://blog.soulcreation.com.
January 7th, 2009 at 2:56 pm
Tweetbacks is a great idea. I too am having the same issue as Todd W. Number of tweets being displayed but nothing else.
January 7th, 2009 at 4:01 pm
I have the same problem as Daniel (comment #26) in that it says 3 Tweetbacks but only shows one. Also, page load is VERY slow, which is preventing my page from drawing within a reasonable amount of time. Is the slow speed due to everyone hitting your server? If that’s the case, why not release a plugin version or some other version that doesn’t suck your server resources?
Otherwise, great idea. Would love to see it fully functional on my site.
January 7th, 2009 at 7:00 pm
Everyone should download the javascript for this code and host on your website. The file is loading slow fron Dan’s site and is causing the lag issues that alot of people are mentioning.
Simply load http://danzarrella.com/tbjs.php in a browser. You can copy the source into your favorite text editor, save and upload.
I’m guessing that Dan’s bandwidth bill won’t mind.
January 7th, 2009 at 7:07 pm
I stand corrected on my last post.
I’ll post something in a few that you peeps can download.
January 7th, 2009 at 9:00 pm
Cool tool, but way too slow to be usable (no doubt your site is suffering) why not release the PHP that enables this so people can use their own server bandwidth?
Jeremy: Yeah, that’s not gonna work bud - you’ll need the PHP source code, or write your own based on his concept. The PHP file generates the javascript for you based on the referrer URL.
January 7th, 2009 at 9:27 pm
Innovative and imaginative Dan.
Kudos.
January 8th, 2009 at 3:11 am
Hi Dan,
Thanks so much for taking my idea and making it reality
I’d love to work with you more on making this into a Wordpress plugin and some of the options I talked about. Please email me if you are keen.
Cheers
Rachel
January 8th, 2009 at 5:36 am
Soooo Cooooool.
January 8th, 2009 at 6:39 am
I always thought Twitter could replace comment systems on blogs and stuff! Such should reduce trolling!
This looks like a step in that direction. I wonder if you plan on adding a link to show Tweetback conversations amongst followers (i.e. johnny links to X, then follower sue says great post & RT) and making each Twitterer who appears on a blog linkable back to their acct?
Obviously a lot can be done here and overall the possibilities of what Twitter can be used for and applied to is boundless.
January 8th, 2009 at 3:02 pm
Peeps.
I’ve written a downloadable version of Dan’s brilliant idea, called TweetBackRedux that works on PHP enabled servers.
http://assets.mindcomet.net/jeremyhilton/
Please note a few things about this version.
* It caches URL shortener api calls for efficiency
* There is only support for TinyURL, Bit.ly, and is.gd.
* The Twitter search API is not case sensitive. URL shorteners are. This version removes invalid tweetbacks that makes their way into results due to this difference.
Installation instructions are contained with the source as well as my Twitter handle. Hit me up with any questions, I’ll do my best to answer, but can’t guarantee that I will.
January 8th, 2009 at 5:35 pm
Thank you Jeremy! I totally wanted this for my site, but didn’t like how slow. Now it’s up to my own server! Here it is in action: http://www.bestwebimage.com/archives/new-poll-on-wednesday/
January 8th, 2009 at 6:54 pm
No problem Rob!
I’m already working on version 0.3, which will have an uber-easy to use javascript micro-templating system to allow for complete control over the styling of TweetBacks.
Look for it in the couple of days.
January 8th, 2009 at 6:57 pm
A few months ago I hunted around on Twitter trying to find a developer that would write this exact plugin for me. I was willing to pay for it and would have even released it for free, I was so desperate to have the functionality on my site.
Thanks Dan!
January 8th, 2009 at 8:58 pm
This is great! It will come in very handy on my blog!
January 8th, 2009 at 9:42 pm
Anyway you can release the code so we can access the script without placing a load on your server??
Mike
January 8th, 2009 at 11:46 pm
how did you do that?
January 9th, 2009 at 4:04 am
Great idea - love seeing the tweets (and people!) who’ve referenced this post. Thanks!
January 9th, 2009 at 4:24 am
Just wondering if this is compatible with blogger…
January 9th, 2009 at 7:38 am
POSSIBLE BUG:
Hi! Thanks for a great plugin! I’ve installed it on my wordpress blog, and it seems to work like a charm - except for here:
http://www.marienblogg.no/2009/01/08/barnevakt-s%C3%B8kes/
It lists 98 tweetbacks, but none of them are actually pointing to my site.
Have no clue what’s wrong, but maybe you can look at it.
Best regards,
Eivind M.
January 9th, 2009 at 8:09 am
Excellent! In the true spirit of sharing, why don’t you release this under an open source license (we can discuss on which one)? Also, you could put the js on google code & ask it to be linked from there.
January 9th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
Great Idea - but doesn’t seem to work with Bit.ly. TinyURL worked great though….
January 9th, 2009 at 2:18 pm
Nice idea, nice implementation. Find Tweetbacks, Votr, and 200 additional Twitter tips and Twitter tools on MyTwitter Toolbar for Mac or PC. http://mytwittertoolbar.com
January 9th, 2009 at 2:56 pm
I’ve been meaning to build this myself some time ago — thanks for actually getting it done!
January 9th, 2009 at 5:35 pm
Testing this now on my blog. Tweeted about one of my blog posts today and nothing showed up. A separate Twitter account automatically sent out a tweet about the same post today as well, and that one showed up fine. Is there a delay? Do all tweets not show up?
January 9th, 2009 at 6:46 pm
That’s great post i Like it a lot. By the way let me know if you have any more updates would be glad to feature you on Livecrunch check About LC page
January 9th, 2009 at 7:17 pm
That’s great.. I’ll test it on my blog soon..
January 9th, 2009 at 11:07 pm
Dude, just out of courtesy I’m not installing this. You’re going to hit your bandwidth limit VERY soon. Also, PayPal is evil.
I think it’s time to woo investors.
January 10th, 2009 at 11:40 am
@mystady
Downloadable version available at http://quakbak.com
January 11th, 2009 at 8:09 am
I agree with all those suggesting to code this beauty as a WordPress plugin.
January 11th, 2009 at 1:56 pm
Great job, Dan! This is a really cool WP plugin - see my twitter followers already experimenting with it too
January 12th, 2009 at 7:27 pm
Brilliant! Best WP Plugin I’ve seen in ages! Thanks so much.
January 13th, 2009 at 2:02 am
awesome stuff.. implemented too.. now, how about one for friendfeed and google reader? (sorry for the greed
)
January 13th, 2009 at 8:10 am
Nice plugin! My only comment is whether or not you can limit the number of tweetbacks shown. Like in this post with 150 something tweets it took me a while to scroll to the bottom… Pagination possibly?
January 21st, 2009 at 11:44 am
I just don’t like very much that this must run as client-side script and not server-side like TrackBack and the much superior PingBack.
But then, I’m also no big friend of the vendor lock-in we’re seeing with the whole twitter system, so maybe I shouldn’t care?
January 21st, 2009 at 1:58 pm
I get this error in the bottom of my posts when some tweets the post. Anyone have any thoughts?
WordPress database error: [Duplicate entry 'http://twitter.com/teresamorrow/statuses/1136595224' for key 2]
insert into wp_tweetbacks (postID, datetime, tweet, author, link, avatar) values (807, 1232577001, ‘RT @EcoOfficeGals: http://tinyurl.com/9hyajx Green Options: Web Hosting’, ‘teresamorrow’, ‘http://twitter.com/teresamorrow/statuses/1136595224′, ‘http://s3.amazonaws.com/twitter_production/profile_images/69898913/Teresa_pic1_normal.JPG’)
January 27th, 2009 at 1:25 pm
Not sure how either twitter or twitter backs work.
January 29th, 2009 at 7:04 pm
Hi Dan, first let me tell you this is a nice plugin, congrats!
I just included the JS file in the Blog of our company Website (We don’t have Wordpress so the Tweetsuite is not an option for now), trying to style the output I noticed that the markup generated by your JS file is opening-closing the unordered list that should contains the entries and leaving the actual entries out like this:
2 Total TweetBacks:
It displays OK, don’t know if this is on purpose, just wanted to let you know in case is not, cheers!
January 29th, 2009 at 7:05 pm
Sorry, I didn’t escape the HTML
January 29th, 2009 at 7:13 pm
Here it goes again:
<script src=\"http://danzarrella.com/tb.js\"></script>
<div id=\"tweetbacks\">
<b>2 Total TweetBacks:</b>
<ul></ul>
<li …> … </li>
<li …> … </li>
</div>
</div>
February 22nd, 2009 at 10:17 pm
I just got a butt-load (as in 150+) of tweetbacks with none of them referring to my site - they all mention snipurl.com not my site.
February 25th, 2009 at 11:21 am
Just got a repeat of the above situation. All showing up as comments under the same one or two posts. And all tweets from the same user with only a link to snipurl.com
April 11th, 2009 at 10:13 pm
can you include Ping.FM in your list of url shorteners?
am definitely going to try this out.