Blog
Tweetmeme Lives!
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.
[...] re-tweeting popular links (although the light blue interface remains a nightmare to look at). In a blog post today Nick Halstead says Tweetmeme is now grabbing thumbnails of images from the links, ranking twitter [...]
Just want to say that I’m very happy that you want to add support for Identi.ca! I really hope you’ll do so soon, because I’d like to try this service asap. 
Oh, and I also hope you’ll add support for Identi.ca to fav.or.it!
I have looked all over the tweetmeme website and I can’t find any thing that actually describes what Tweetmeme is. I looked on Wikipedia - nothing. I searched Google reading other’s blog posts about what it is. I still don’t really understand what it is.
How about adding a description of what it is on the front page? You might find more people embrace it if they knew what it does.
I’ve given up now and on to the next Twitter app.
Hi Nick
Any chance on tweetmeme on the iphone? Also any chance of working with tweetdeck to integrate the two services.
Sam,
Interesting idea on tweekdeck - integration so you could have one pane that is showing the popular tweet-meme’s + links would be great. I will drop them a line and see what they say.
Before we get to iphone we really want to finish our re-design that will be much more focused on getting our front page to show all 5 categories - and adding the aggregation of the associated images/videos so we make the display much richer.
