It has been a little too long in coming but we have finally got round to doing a major revamp of tweetmeme. The first thing you will notice is that the design has completely changed, we think the much simpler design will give clear access to the best stories coming out of twitter.

The two major feature changes beyond the cosmetic level are tagging and a new leaderboard.

Tagging

In the previous design we showed under each story a selection of the tweets relating to it. This seemed liked a good idea (and lots of people copied us.) but when you have 4000+ people tweeting the same story you are never going to read them all to get an opinion on the story. So now we have built localized tag clouds for each story, we show the most popular words associated just with that story. This we hope can give you a little bit of insight into the story before you decide to click on it.

Leaderboard

One feature of tweetmeme has always been that we tweet back at the person who first discovers a story. This made me start thinking about how often the same person is the one to tweet a link first. Why? well hopefully that person is likely to be someone worth watching in the future, so we have built a leaderboard of the top 100 twitter users ranked based upon their frequency of being the first to tweet a story.

Just a quick reminder of the other features tweetmeme has,

• River of news page
• RSS feed for the river of news
• Individual RSS feeds for each category (e.g. images, videos)
• Historic pages – you can go back to any particular date at 5 minute intervals to see what tweetmeme looked like in the past.

You can also follow @tweetmeme to get the same river of news put into your twitter stream.

Also a shout to Sun’s Startup Essentials who continue to support us as a company and also support tweetmeme with hardware (it takes a lot of power to aggregate the whole of the twitter timeline.)

Lastly if you want updates on tweetmeme and our other products feel free to follow me on twitter as well.