Twitter, FriendFeed, Plurk. What do all of these services have in common? They all provide a way to share and discuss things outside of blogging. One of the complaints I’ve heard from a number of people is that, all of these services provide a means for the conversation to move off of the blog and onto these services. Unless you’re a member of these services, knowing when and if someone is talking about you or your blog has been difficult.
Thanks to a WordPress plugin written by Dan Zarrella called Tweetbacks, at least one of those microblogging services will be routed back to the blog. Tweetbacks works in a similar fashion to trackbacks except instead of links back to the originating post, Tweets or Twitter messages will be shown instead.
So how does it work?
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.
Installation is fairly straightforward and only requires adding one line of code to your template where you want the tweetbacks to be displayed. Tweetbacks is a great way to route the conversation back to your blog.
For directions and information on using the plugin, visit the plugin release page.