TweetBacks Beta

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: