API Documentation

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Introduction

BackType indexes and connects millions of comments from hundreds of thousands of blogs, social networks and other social media. The BackType API allows you to develop applications that leverage our dataset and interact with our website. All requests to the BackType API are HTTP GET and POST requests. The API is available for non-commercial use and each user is limited to 1,000 requests per day. The limited API is free of charge, but its use is subject to our Terms of Use. Please contact us if you would like that limit extended or if you would like to request any additional functionality.

Commercial Use

Currently, our limited, free API (1,000 daily requests) is available for commercial and non-commercial use. If you would like to use our API at higher volume, please contact us regarding pricing and/or to discuss a potential partnership. Provide as much detail as you can about your application and how you would like our business relationship to work. We will review your proposal and get back to you as soon as possible.

Wire Format

All BackType API responses are available in two data formats: JSON and XML. To specify an output format, request the appropriate extension.

Authentication

Please login and re-visit this page to obtain your API key. If you aren't yet registered for BackType, click here to sign up.

All requests require the following parameters:

Parameter	Required	Description
key	Yes	API key

Callbacks

The callback property can be used to wrap the output to a function call using the JSON format:

GET http://api.backtype.com/user/user/comments.json?callback=foo&key=key

Pagination

Most requests support the following parameters for pagination:

Parameter	Default	Required	Description
page	1	No	The page number (there are 25 results per page)
itemsperpage	25	No	The number of items per page (must be between 10-100)