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Private company

BackType

BackType was a SaaS social media analytics service launched in August 2008. Initially, BackType was focused only on blog comments, aggregating comments from across blogs and allowing users to search them by topic or author. It followed with BackType Connect, a service that allowed users to reverse lookup a URL to view comments written in response across the web.2 It is headquartered in San Francisco.1 Wikipedia text CC BY-SA 4.0

Last updated Oct 21, 2026.

Overview

2008Founded1

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BackType was a SaaS social media analytics service launched in August 2008.2

Products and brands

The distributed data processing work to build the BackType product became the basis for the Lambda architecture. At its peak scale, BackType was storing 25 terabytes of compressed binary data on its servers, holding over 100 billion individual records. Its API served 400 requests per second on average.

Apache Storm, a distributed stream processing computation framework written predominantly in the Clojure programming language was created at BackType, and later open sourced at Twitter. Storm was made a Top-Level Project by the Apache Foundation in 2014.

From Wikipedia’s article on BackType, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3

Acquisitions

On July 5, 2011, BackType was acquired by Twitter for an undisclosed sum.

From Wikipedia’s article on BackType, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3

Timeline

  1. 2008Founded Founded1

Sources

The numbers on this page point here. Each one links to the record it came from.

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