Yes! As Louis Gray has just revealed tweetmeme is back up and running again. We are now taking advantage of the summize purchase and the abilities it brings to twitter. We may drop back to the XMPP once it is reliable as do gain a lot of extra information beyond just the links that we are looking for.

During the outage we did do a lot of other development on tweetmeme which we have not yet put live, the reason? Well the codebase got pretty messy with all the swapping of interfaces and so we now need to merge back in the changes. So what else have we done?

Images / Videos

We do get a lot of links that point at blog posts or directly at images + videos, and we thought it would make the interface a lot nicer if we could mix in some images, so we took some code from fav.or.it and started grabbing thumbnails of images from the links we found.

Better Ranking

Although ranking based upon the number of URL’s is interesting we wanted to take the concept a little further, so took the reddit model and introduced a ‘kudos’ factor for each twitter user, their ‘kudos’ increases for every story they are the first to post (and that then subsequently gets elevated onto the top stories). The kudos is then used to rank stories themselves, so a user with a higher kudos has more chance of getting a story promoted.

Spam

Tweetmeme does currently leave itself very open to Spam (damn those evil spamlords) – there are a number of services out there trying to tackle this problem (twitter seems to be ignoring it) and we have a few tricks that we are going to try and get the majority of it.

Lastly we will also be investigating the aggregation of other micro-blogging services, plurk and identi.ca are prime candidates so that as people migrate between services the overall number of URL’s + tweets continues to grow.

We will make an announcement as soon as we have merged all the code back together and push out a new release. For now please give us your feedback on what else you would like to see from tweetmeme.