BackTweets

BackTweets is a Twitter (now X) analytics tool which allows users to search through a Tweet archive for links, including shortened URLs^[2] that were sent on Twitter.

BackTweets was developed by BackType and released on Friday March 6, 2009.^[1][3] A short time after its launch, the service received significant media attention, most notably from Twitter^[4] and popular social media news site Mashable.^[5] In March 2011 BackType raised $1 million in seed funding from investors such as True Ventures, K9 Ventures, Freestyle Capital, Founder Collective and others.^[6][7] This was in addition to the $315,000 in funding it had raised previously from Y Combinator and True Ventures.^[8] On July 5, 2011 BackType announced that it had been purchased by Twitter, would be relocating to Twitter's offices and would be discontinuing BackType and its API.^[9][10][11] A few months after the acquisition the BackTweets service was shut down.^[12][13]

On March 6, 2012 the domain BackTweets.com was bought in a public auction by Sorezki Ltd. who re-launched the site as a free service.^[14][15]

BackTweets enables individuals, companies and their competitors to gauge the quantity and quality of their Twitter reach by showing the number of times a link was tweeted^[16] as well as the actual tweet that was made.^[17] From a business perspective, the BackTweets service can help corporations understand how individuals interact with their brand.^[18] The service requires neither a username nor registration to the site.^[19] As opposed to Twitter's search capacity,^[2] BackTweets tracks all links which were tweeted, regardless of the form they were shared in, which prevents users from getting fragmented information about their Twitter link presence.^[20] In response to a search, tweets are returned in reverse chronological order with the most recent tweets appearing first in the list.^[19]