History

BackType was founded in 2008. It got 15 thousand dollars of seed funding from Y Combinator

Y Combinator

Y Combinator is an American seed-stage startup funding firm, started in March 2005. Y Combinator provides seed money, advice, and connections at two 3-month programs per year...

 at that time, and it was awarded 300 thousand dollars of venture capital

Venture capital

Venture capital is financial capital provided to early-stage, high-potential, high risk, growth startup companies. The venture capital fund makes money by owning equity in the companies it invests in, which usually have a novel technology or business model in high technology industries, such as...

 funding from True Ventures in 2009.

On 5 July 2011 BackType was acquired by Twitter

Twitter

Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July...

.

Functions

BackType has two functions. The first is letting people create individual profiles on themselves that link together profiles on different social networking web sites. It also lets people "claim" comments via a URL. Any comment in BackType's database with that URL in the comment is linked to the profile. The second function that BackType provides is a search engine function. It allows searches to be formed in the database of social media information by keyword or person.