I am pleased to announce the launch of a new service tweetmeme. I have started using twitter a lot more recently to find out what is ‘going on’ and many people who I had discussed twitter with were saying the same thing. What I believed was missing was a way to spot content that is posted on twitter and work out what is popular.
Thus tweetmeme was born, put simply it watches what is going on within twitter and picks up anyone posting links to content. We then track how many other mentions of the same content are made (and how influential they are.) and present them in a simple format.
And because the content that is posted on twitter is of a very wide content we also broadly categorize it, these are broken down into blogs / video / images / audio.
Archive
Every five minutes the system takes a snapshot of the current content and produces the web pages you view, this allows us also to build up an archive of how it looked over time, the site lets you access any of the previous pages via a simple set of drop-down boxes.
Feeds
It is also possible to subscribe to a RSS feed for either the frontpage or any of the individual categories, each of the feeds contains a list of items as they are added onto tweetmeme.
Notification
Whenever a new piece of content is added into tweetmeme we automatically notify the user who first mentioned it back through twitter, this appears from the ‘tweetmeme’ twitter user. This is meant as another way to follow the content being found by twitter but also as a reward to the user so they get notified that they were the first to spot it.
River
Along with the feeds you can also access a ‘river’ view of the content as it was added.
Thanks
This project has only possible because of help from a number of very talented people. So let me first thank Marjolein Hoekstra who first twittered about the concept and since then has been a constant sounding board for the project. And because we are maxed out internally Stuart Dallas has been of massive assistance, Stuart has previously assisted on fav.or.it and we greatly appreciate all his efforts.
And lastly a big thanks to XCalibre who are supplying the hosting on FlexiScale which is a computing on demand platform (like Amazon EC2) which should help us cope with any major peaks in traffic.
UPDATE: I have been very quickly reminded how much influence has come from Techmeme when building this project, Gabe my apologies for not making mention before, fancy sharing links between the two services?
Nick Halstead (favorit Ltd)
[...] can read all about it on the Tweetmeme blog, but in short it watches activity on Twitter and keeps track of popular URLs. There is a river of [...]
This is great. Now is their any way to get a translator or maybe specific pages for certain countries?
Cool, but I second Gabe Rivera’s comment on the TechCrunch post about acknowledgement of ‘inspiration’ for the site lay-out and terminology …
wow. this rocks. thanx!
This is a masterpiece. Thanks
[...] written in PHP5 and uses only about 20 PHP files to get the job done. You can also check out the launch post over on tweetmeme’s blog for more information on the service. [...]
it’s a great implementation on web..
i like this site and with great features.
thanks tweetmeme.
[...] recently Tweetmeme officially lunched on web. And from this site with categories basis you will get different types of test [...]
[...] recently Tweetmeme officially announced and Tweetmeme lunched on web. And from this site with categories basis you will get [...]
In a next fase of complexity, memes of the major microblogs will be compared I presume.
Twitter is great, but the proliferation of microblogs in the nice markets of specific language groups is immense.
Chinese, Spanish, Russian, French, Portuguese, Arabic, Italian, Indian, German, Polish, Korean, Dutch microblogs exist
Apparently on all of them English language post with an URL don’t form a problem:
it just means to link will be in English.
Anyway, the long tail distribution of an url is also very important in my view.
[...] some of you all who never heard of Tweetmeme, it’s a Web application that went live in January this year, down for a period of time due to the Twitter Jabber problems, and it’s [...]