BackType

» see backtype.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

i did not use backtype. the dashboards were built for people whose job title contained the words social media, and that was not my job. what makes the company worth a marker is not the product at all, it is that the infrastructure written to make the product possible outlived it by more than a decade and reached parts of the industry that never heard the name.

christopher golda and michael montano started it in 2008 and went through y combinator's summer batch with fifteen thousand dollars. the first version solved a small, real annoyance: your comments were scattered across a hundred blogs with no way to find them again. backtype crawled comment sections and indexed them by author, so a person had a single findable trail across the commentable web.

from there it grew into the reply layer generally. BackType Connect took a url and showed you everywhere on the web that was responding to it, following shortened links back to their targets so a tweet counted as a response. BackTweets did the same job for twitter alone and became the better-known half, because publishers wanted to know how far a link had traveled and twitter itself was not telling them. true ventures put in three hundred thousand dollars in 2009 and a round of a little over a million followed in march 2011.

twitter bought the company on 5 july 2011 for an undisclosed sum. the products were closed to new registrations immediately and shut down over the following months. within about ten weeks twitter shipped its own web analytics, built by the same people, and the backtype team went on to shape a large part of twitter's advertising engineering.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

backtype existed because of a specific gap. around 2008 the discussion of a piece of writing stopped happening underneath the piece of writing. it moved to twitter and to a hundred other people's blogs, and the author had no way to see it. technorati had tried to solve the blog half of this and was already declining. backtype was the attempt at the version that included the short-form web.

that turned out to be a hard engineering problem rather than a hard product problem. following every shortened link back to a real url, at the volume twitter was producing by 2010, is a continuous computation over a stream that never stops and never repeats. the team could not batch it overnight and could not afford to recompute it. so they wrote their own machinery.

~ the actual end ~

the death was an acquisition, which is the softest way for a startup to die and still leaves the users with nothing. twitter did not want the comment index. it wanted the analytics competence and the people, at a moment when it was building an advertising business and needed to prove reach to buyers.

BackTweets is the loss worth naming. it was the only good public tool for asking how a specific url had spread on twitter, and it was used by newsrooms and researchers who had no other instrument for the question. when it went dark that measurement moved inside twitter and became something you paid for or asked nicely about. the pattern repeated for the next decade until the api itself was priced out of reach.

~ what it left ~

nathan marz wrote the stream processor at backtype. twitter open-sourced it in september 2011, two months after the acquisition, under the name Storm. it became an apache top-level project in 2014 and for years it was the default answer for anyone who needed to compute over a live stream rather than over a table at midnight.

the same work produced the lambda architecture, the pattern of running a slow accurate batch layer and a fast approximate streaming layer side by side and merging the two. that idea got implemented badly in a lot of places and was eventually superseded. it still shaped how a generation of data engineers thought about the difference between a number that is right and a number that is right now. a comment search engine nobody remembers paid for all of it.

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