Library clips

retaggr is a profile card widget that you can embed in your blog, others I’ve mentioned are txtms, and hyplet.

If you use a lifestream service like Friendfeed , Profilactic, etc…you can generate a similar widget, and some stand alone services like ShowYourself and others, but retaggr is more than just a profile aggregator widget, it’s a contact and information card, it even contains your latest tweet. This widget is deeper than just one page, if you click the mail icon it turns into a contact list page, and if you click on the email icon it will turn into an email form. If you click on the Twitter icon it displays your latest tweets, in fact if you click on most of your profile icons you can read the latest entries in the retaggr widget.

If widgets take up too much space for your blog, then you can use a button instead, and it will activate your profile card when you click it or hover over it. There is also an email signature version of your profile card (mine is missing my avatar for the moment). There’s another feature where you can retaggr enable your site, this way other retaggr user avatars will appear in comments, and certain words in your posts will be hotlinked to retaggr information.

There are a few more features to check out like searching for other retaggr people.

Here’s my retaggr:

Here’s the mouse over button:

Here’s the clickable button:

EMAIL SIGNATURE

I just noticed that the bottom of the profile card widget has a link to get some embed code, and one is to your profile page on retaggr:

John Tropea

Twitgraph - analytics of your account, also see Tweetrush.

Tweetbeep - ego alerts for the Tweetosphere…find out when anyone mentions your name or links to your site

Twitbuzz - a twitter memetracker, also see Tweetmeme and others.

Tweeple Twak - Manage and analytics for your Twitter followers

TwitterSafe - back up your tweets, also see Tweetake

BONUS LINK
Twittermania: 140+ More Twitter Tools!

At the moment, all the comments I make in the blogosphere are bookmarked in a delicious account, which is a pain because I’m constantly logging in and out of both my accounts. Anyway this enables me to keep a collection or stream of comments I make elsewhere, I even feed this into Friendfeed.

I then track the comment at co.mments which is added to my co.mments feed, this way I can keep up with any new comments made on the same blog post.

I could do both these things at coComment, and more as you can follow other users, search and browse tag all comments in this system, etc…but I don’t because I find this service overwhelming with features, it just doesn’t have the simplicity and effectiveness of Twitter, delicious, Friendfeed, Google, etc…

In comes Backtype.

It seems to be a way to store all the comments you make in the blogosphere, but you don’t store them, instead it harvests them from the blogosphere itself by looking for the URL you leave in the URL field when you make a comment in a blogs comment form. It matches this URL with the one you entered in your Backtype profile. So it treats the URL you put in the URL field as your ID. Sometimes people have several ID’s, they may put the URL of their blog, Twitter, Friendfeed…personally I always us my blog URL. Anyway, the Backtype settings allow you to enter multiple URL’s as your ID.

You have to trust that it’s actually collecting all the comments you make (I do feel safer bookmarking comments, as I have comfort they are stored as I did it myself…but let’s see how we go).

If you search for your name in Backtype it may already have a page where you can claim comments you have made in the blogosphere, kind of like a pre-made account.

Not only have I got my User page (http://www.backtype.com/johnt) that I made, there is already a mirror type URL page (http://www.backtype.com/url/libraryclips.blogsome.com)…I found this by searching for my name, and it asked if I want to claim these comments.

What this URL page means is that whoever leaves a comment in the blogosphere with my URL in the comment form URL field, it will appear in my URL page…let’s hope I’m the only person doing this (I will surely find out now if people in the blogosphere are signing off comments using my URL in the URL field of a comment form).

Just say on my Backtype registered User profile settings I also entered my Twitter URL, as I may sometimes use that in comment forms, then these comments would appear in my user page stream, but not in my URL page stream…so there is a difference here.

Now you could say that anyone could make a comment in the blogosphere and use the URL of your blog, this would spam your stream with comments not made by you. The way around this is to go to your settings and turn on moderation.

So in a way Backtype is my comment blog or stream, from comments I make in the blogosphere, only thing I need to do is import all the comments I’ve been saving in delicious.

It could replace my method of bookmarking comments I make in delicious as Backtype saves me doing this, but I will still need to use co.mments to track others comments made on the same blog post…which is OK with me.

Item

For each item (comment) in the stream you can launch to the original comment. You can also share that comment which lives in your Shared Items stream, it’s like re-blogging a comment because you like it.

Profile

Backtype is not just about me, I can search for people and see their comment stream, and I can “follow” them.

On a User profile we can see:

- their comment stream
- a link to who that person follows
- a link to their Shared Items page
- a link to who is following them
- a link to an RSS feed for their comment stream
- Backtype profiles from blogs commented on
eg. if I comment on a Read Write Web blog post, then their profile will be listed on the sidebar as a source I comment on

I’d like to filter my stream or a users stream by blog source commented on eg. filter my stream by comments I have made on the Read Write Web blog.

Types of Profiles - User, URL, blog

As alluded to at the start of this post you may not even need to create an account, as you may already have a URL profile that represents you (which people can follow to add to their network). But if you want to get network with people and create a dashboard then you need to register.
I still think two accounts becomes confusing, once I claim the comments of my URL profile it should no longer exist and be absorbed into my User profile.

It doesn’t stop there, there is a third type of profile…not just people have profiles, and not just URL’s have profiles, but blog’s also have profiles, check out Read Write Web.
This is a stream of every post made on Read Write Web…at least that’s what I think it’s doing. If the item (comment) is from a non-Backtype user the item (comment) will not have hyperlink to the commenters Backtype user page.

You cannnot follow a blog URL, instead they have a list of Top contributors (with an RSS feed as well).
This is great if you own a blog as subscribing to this feed will keep you in the loop of who your most dedicated commenters (fans) are.
For this top list type feed, I wonder if they would consider using an SLE feed (rather than a regular RSS feed)

Here’s an example of three types of profiles for a given user:

User:
Louis Gray

URL’s:
URL/Louis Gray.com
URL/friendfeed.com/louisgray

Blog:
blog/Louis Gray.com

Dashboard

My dashboard has a friendstream where I can see the latest comments from people I follow, with an RSS feed, and also a Shared stream from people I follow, which also has an RSS feed.

Subscribing to this feed is going to be a great addition to Google Reader, now I not only subscribe to a blogger, but I can also to the comments bloggers I like make in the blogosphere in one easy feed (or I could go to each profile and subscribe to these individually).
It seems like my Backtype profile page feed is going to be a handy source to put in my Friendfeed stream.

I wish my Dashboard also had a “me” stream, and a stream for items I have Shared, instead I have to go to my public user profile.

As always when finding a new promising service I’d like to run my buddy list through it so I don’t have to spend time searching for my usual friends.

Searching

Searching Backtype is like searching the commentsphere…Yacktrack is a service achieving something different in the comment space, but they both have a similar aspect of being the commentsphere search engine.

You can search for both people and comments.
The People page has a list of the most followed people (with an RSS feed)
The Comments page has a stream of Recent comments (Timeline), and Top comments (with an RSS feed)
The search results page also has a feed, and there is a nifty advanced search.
I’d like to search for a keyword by a user, but it lacks a user field.
- Reason being is this way I can search my comments
- I’d also like to search comments limited to just my network

It seems easy enough to work out top commenters (this can be based on the top comments), just not sure how these top comments are worked out.

See Louis Gray’s post for more.

iPond - We can share links via blog post footer buttons like ShareThis and Tell-A-Friend. One of the options when doing this is to share a link via email, in this case ShareThis gives you some web space so you remember all the links you sent to which people. Siphs goes a step further as your webspace is an actual blog, and I mentioned in this post a while ago that you could make a memedigger out of all the Siph users…that is, list all the popular links that are being shared onto a page where they could be voted on and re-shared. Another player in this field that does not take the advantage of aggregating all the shared links is Google Shared Stuff.

This brings us to iPond (based on the Grouptivity discuss blog footer button), which aggregates all the links shared by the footer button into a memedigger of sorts.

Slinkset - A whitelabel memedigger (basically a Ning for memedigging). Also see reddit, CoRank, and Pligg (Fraxi). [via TC]

Browzmi - collaborative social bookmarking. Not only can you bookmark, but you can also see which website your friends currently are in real-time and chat with them…similar to me.dium [via RWW]

Blastgroups - browse for groups to join and blast a message to.

If you want to get more serious create a group at CollectiveX, see more. Then moving on to more network types like GROU.PS, Ning, YouFig, Flux, KickApps, and more. [via m]

FFHolic - find out all the popular content and people who use FriendFeed…find some links to other FF delights. [via m]

Twitter Grader - it grades your profile based on follower info, frequency of updates and more…my grade was 93 out of 100. They should make their badge embeddable, it will make their site more popular.

Tweetrush - check you stats, here are mine

Lazytweet - yet another Twitter Q&A…for other question sites see, ToAnswer, AnswerMe, TweetAnswers

Twittad - make money from Twitter with ads on your site

tweetSMS - Twitter have had to cut down on international SMS, so in steps tweetSMS to save the day.