TweetBacks Beta

Jan 6th 2009 View Comments




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:


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  • http://www.WritingWhitePapers.com/blog Michael A. Stelzner

    Anyway you can release the code so we can access the script without placing a load on your server??

    Mike

  • http://www.omtv.cc omtv

    how did you do that?

  • http://confidentwriting.com Joanna Young

    Great idea – love seeing the tweets (and people!) who’ve referenced this post. Thanks!

  • http://techmata.blogspot.com TechMata

    Just wondering if this is compatible with blogger…

  • http://www.marienblogg.no Eivind M.

    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.

  • http://scorpfromhell.blogspot.com scorpfromhell

    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.

  • http://www.ignitehq.com Chad B

    Great Idea – but doesn’t seem to work with Bit.ly. TinyURL worked great though….

  • http://mytwittertoolbar.com Dan Hollings

    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

  • http://julianschrader.de Julian Schrader

    I’ve been meaning to build this myself some time ago — thanks for actually getting it done! :-)

  • http://www.ryandillman.com Ryan

    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?

  • http://www.livecrunch.com Livecrunch

    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 :)

  • http://webatlantis.org Ilias

    That’s great.. I’ll test it on my blog soon..

  • http://www.mystady.com MY STADY

    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.

  • http://homeculinaire.blogspot.com Jeremy HIlton

    @mystady

    Downloadable version available at http://quakbak.com

  • http://http//katalink.com David Taboada

    I agree with all those suggesting to code this beauty as a WordPress plugin.

  • http://m-trends.org Rudy De Waele

    Great job, Dan! This is a really cool WP plugin – see my twitter followers already experimenting with it too :)

  • http://mattsingley.com/blog Matt Singley

    Brilliant! Best WP Plugin I’ve seen in ages! Thanks so much.

  • http://www.manuscrypts.com/brants manuscrypts

    awesome stuff.. implemented too.. now, how about one for friendfeed and google reader? (sorry for the greed :D )

  • http://keaneangle.com Keane

    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?

  • http://home.kairo.at/blog/ Robert Kaiser

    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?

  • http://eco-officegals.com Jen @ Eco-Office Gals

    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’)

  • Judith VanAlphen

    Not sure how either twitter or twitter backs work.

  • http://www.nearsoft.com Jorge Pablos

    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!

  • http://www.nearsoft.com Jorge Pablos

    Sorry, I didn’t escape the HTML :|

  • http://www.nearsoft.com Jorge Pablos

    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>

  • http://www.casadeblundell.com/jonathan Jonathan Blundell

    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.

  • http://www.casadeblundell.com/jonathan Jonathan Blundell

    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

  • http://culturekitchen.com liza

    can you include Ping.FM in your list of url shorteners?
    am definitely going to try this out.

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  • http://zedomax.com/blog zedomax

    Interesting, is TweetBack getting you more traffic? I don't see it used here anymore, did you stop using it?

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  • http://hangingstars.blogspot.com/ darla aka Alrady40

    Came by because i needeed to update my background. Love you page.. .just sent a retweet!

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  • seoconsultantNY

    Great concept. I'll be using it!

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  • JoeyQ

    Thanks!

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    Nice post here. It does make senses, appreciate for sharing.

  • http://www.galaxyhandbags.com/ Gucci Handbags

    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.

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  • enjoy

    Now this is cool!!!, great idea!, why cant I think of things like this?;))

  • enjoy
  • dontcry

    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.
    club penguin cheats

  • dontcry

    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.
    club penguin cheats

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