How Chat Catcher is More Inclusive Than TweetBacks

With the ongoing battle of (t)wits between Dan Zarrella, Joost de Valk, Shannon Whitley, Jeremy Hilton, and other developers of plugins and scripts enabling Twitter messages to appear amid blog comments and trackbacks, recent readers of AriWriter asked me what I use.

My involvement began six weeks ago when I spotted tweets referenced in blog comments maintained by Dave Fleet and Todd Defren. How did they do it? I wondered, desiring a way to meld my blog with my micr0-blog and the comments and replies on both.

Intuition led me to Shannon Whitley and his tweet tracking experiment, resulting in back-and-forth emails throughout December as he alerted me about script revisions and I shared with him my ideas for improvement.

Earlier this month, Shannon shared his Chat Catcher script with the world:

Chat Catcher is new and it isn’t perfect, but I’m done keeping quiet.  You’re welcome to give it a try and help me make improvements.  As I like to say for most of my projects, this is your service as much as it is mine.  Let’s build it together.

You can see the result in last weekend’s post about why old media should adapt new media. With the exception of the New York Times, every other trackback in this screen shot is a tweet. You can click the image to view the respective post, and see where those links go:

Two features of Chat Catcher I enjoy include the tracking of all URL shorteners and filtering. Whether you use tinyurl, twurl, bit.ly, zi.ma, or anything else in your 140-character tweet to reduce the 67 characters of http://www.ariwriter.com/2009/01/why-old-media-cant-deny-new-media/, you’re tracked. The program also allows me to filter the results (I exclude @ariherzog and @ariwriterdotcom).

By contrast, you can see what Dan Zarrella offers with TweetBacks. I’m guessing more people probably know about TweetBacks than Chat Catcher, if only for recent articles on Mashable about the Twitter message-as-trackback service to appear above a blog’s comment section, as in the below example:

After tweeting with Dan, I have a clearer understanding of the difference between Chat Catcher and his TweetBacks script and TweetSuite plugin.

• TweetBacks is built in JavaScript and the code must be manually inserted into a file, not unlike Chat Catcher. The script runs on Dan’s server, can filter-out multiple usernames (meaning, in the above example, tweets by @mattsingley and @bobgarrett, should they work in the same company, could be excluded from the results), but only works with five URL shorteners. Chat Catcher has no limit.
• TweetSuite is a Wordpress plugin and shows avatars, full status messages, and retweet links, as in the above example. Unlike TweetBacks (and Chat Catcher), TweetSuite only allows filtering of one username. Mashable also wrote about this. You can see this in action at Managing the Edge.

Two other choices for viewing Twitter messages in or around blog comments are Jeremy Hilton’s amendment of TweetBacks to run on your own server, which he calls Quakbak; and Joost de Valk’s similar-sounding TweetBacks for Wordpress plugin.

You can use what you want, but I keep my Twitter trust in Shannon Whitley and his since-updated Chat Catcher service, which now offers a choice between a script and a plugin (thereby enabling it to be used on non-Wordpress blogs), integration with Disqus, SEO friendliness, RSS options, and future goals to track FriendFeed and other links, too.

None of the other options offer the inclusion of Chat Catcher.

There you have it, Geoff Girardin and everyone else who asked.

Related posts:

1. My 20 Most Popular Blog Posts on Social Media
2. Do You Use Twitter? Yes or No?

Tagged as: Chat Catcher, comments, TweetBacks, Twitter

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