Staying Ahead of the Hype in Real-time

With the real-time web becoming a reality, it’s important to find ways to stay ahead, or at least abreast, of what’s going on online. You’ve a come across a new service and want to know what the buzz is. You want to see who else is talking about the article you’re reading, possibly to engage them in conversation. Maybe you just want to see if anyone is talking about your own content. Here are a few tools to help you out.

Backtweets

Backtweets is a service “brought to you by the fine gentleman of BackType.” It shows you all the latest tweets about the site you’re looking at. Basic in it’s implementation, but it provides useful information. Simply grab the bookmarklet to get started.

BackType Connect

Taking the concept of BackTweets a step further, BackType Connect shows you all conversations going on about a particular site, but  it’s not just limited to Twitter. BackType Connect grabs comments from Twitter, FriendFeed, blog comments across the web, and more. Just as with Backtweets, simply drag the bookmarklet to your toolbar to get connected.

ConvoTrack

Powered by the same technology used by BackType Connect, ConvoTrack makes it even easier to see the entire conversation surrounding a post or site. This bookmarklet will load comments from Twitter, FriendFeed, Digg, Reddit, HackerNews and catches any blog mentions. The reason that ConvoTrack is so much cooler than BackType Connect is that it opens up in a “handy” sidebar. This prevents you from interrupting your workflow.

YackTrack

YackTrack works about the same as BackType Connect, but it’s been around a little longer. In an effort to decrease the damage done to conversations by comment fragmentation across multiple services, YackTrack tries to find all the comments and bring them to you. As a content creator, this helps you stay in touch with those who are actually talking about your stuff.

One of the most interesting features of YackTrack is called Chatter. It lets you search the social web to see what people are saying about specific keywords. Not only is this an extremely powerful tool, but I’m not sure if there is any other service that matches it. YackTrack also has a bookmarklet available so that you can use it on the go.

Bit.ly

I bet you thought bit.ly was just another URL shortener, but there is a lot of power under that hood. Not only does bit.ly provide you with basic visitor statistics, but it also grabs conversations from across the social web. Best part about this is that you can see most of this data using the bit.ly sidebar bookmarklet. Just visit the tools page, drop it on your toolbar, and you’ll be able to shorten a URL, see how many others have visited that URL, and see what conversations are going on about that URL across the web.

TBUZZ

According to their website, TBUZZ is “the easiest way to talk about the web pages you visit on Twitter.” To use TBUZZ, simply drag the bookmarklet to your browser’s toolbar (IE users, right-click and Add to Favorites). When you’ve found an interesting site, click the bookmarklet to see what your tweeps are saying about it.

You can even post an update to Twitter and refresh the results for a little real-time action. TBUZZ allows you to easily quote the site as well, just select the text you want before you click the bookmarklet. I can’t lie, TBUZZ is pretty slick and the bookmarklet interface is one of the best I’ve seen yet.