We’ve all used them: services that allow us to take that horrendously long URL and compress it into a manageable size so it won’t take up too many precious characters in our tweets.

Here at Tweetmeme, we’re constantly downloading and storing your tweets with links in, so we’re in a unique position of being able to tell you exactly how many of you are using which URL-shortening service, and how they’re competing. We’ve taken a couple of weeks worth of data from Tweetmeme , and compiled the top 5 URL shorteners.

 
As you can see, Tinyurl.com is clearly in the lead at the moment – this is most probably because it is the default service that both Twitter and Twhirl use (TweetDeck uses Bit.ly by default, but can use others) to shorten users’ URLs when required.

But we can do more than that – we’ve stored data from when the links are posted over time, so we can show you how the use is trending over time.

 
Use of top 5 URL shortening services over a 2-week period.

 
Close-up of services not including Tinyurl.com.

I find the content that comes through twitter amazingly varied, this is both great for getting interesting content, but also with the growth of twitter a lot of the content can be outside my personal zone of interest. So today we start along a path of categorizing the content so that it is easier for users to find the top stories that they have a particular interest within.

Channels

The concept of hashtags is well known on twitter and we wanted to leverage the hard work some twitter users put in hashtagging content correctly. We have built a engine that picks out #hashtags and keywords and uses that data to selectively put stories into relevant channels.

We have put together 4 simple channels live today and will be looking for ideas from the community on the kind of channels they would like to see built. This is a very much proof-of-concept and there is a lot of tweaking still to be done.

If you have ideas on what kind of channels you would like to see us build (they dont take long to setup!) please drop us a comment or use the feedback tab.

With the release of the tweetmeme API on March the 4th (blog post) we have decided to utilise our own API and build a nice widget. This widget can display the most popular or recent tweets in any of 4 categories.

The Editor

Even if you have no knowledge of programming we give you a really simple interface to create your own widget. You can easily change the colours, the width and the data which the widget fetches. The we give you a nice bit of JavaScript to integrate into your site.

Advanced Options

The widget is built on top of the tweetmeme API, so it is possible to completely customise the widget to your own use. Let us know in the comments where and how you decided to use the widget.

If you follow trends on Tweetmeme you will know that MacHeist have chosen today to give away a free copy of DEVONthink to anyone who is happy to tweet. All users have to do to is tweet a special tweet including a link to the MacHeist ‘TweetBlast’ page (http://www.macheist.com/tweetblast/). This has gone viral, and as each tweet contains that little ‘http’ text, Tweetmeme has been busy collecting and counting all these tweets! It has had more tweets than we’ve ever seen on Tweetmeme for a single link, currently over 16,000.

We pride ourselves in getting upcoming stories out to our users as quickly as possible, but maybe this morning we were just a bit too quick. Users to Tweetmeme before about 9 GMT this morning will have noticed that we were showing an incorrect title for the MacHeist story, specifically a ’404’ error.

It seems the MacHeist developers were running some tests about two hours before they launched the TweetBlast, assuming no-one would see their test tweets on their quiet test account:

2009-03-05 00:05:55

@kallebootest Yeah, I’ll take a free copy of DEVONthink! http://macheist.com/tweetblast/ #kallebootest #free

As this was before the launch, this link didn’t exist, and returned a missing page. Tweetmeme would have correctly ignored this page because an error occurred, but MacHeist appear to still return a 200 (HTTP ok) code on error pages, so Tweetmeme unknowingly stored it.

Two hours later MacHeist launched their free give-away site and the tweets flooded in, but Tweetmeme already had all the data it needed for the site so did not re-spider. The story climbed up the Tweetmeme front page, with its incorrect title. Obviously once we saw the error, we fixed it, and it now shows correctly.

Twitter users need to be careful when they post something that is not supposed to be found by others. No-matter how few follows the account has: Tweetmeme is always listening!

The twitter firehose is a LOT of data, TweetMeme spends it’s life sifting through finding all the URL’s resolving millions of shortened URL’s (e.g. http://bit.ly, http://tinyurl.com) in the process. Once resolved we go grab the title of the story, and also do a lot of clever stuff to get images/videos + the body of text (i.e. the description of the story).

We thought it would be useful to expose this data via a set of API calls which developers could use to improve their twitter applications who do not wish the massive burden of processing all the data that TweetMeme does.

From Today we launch 3 simple methods that expose a small part of our dataset, these will hopefully be followed by more that allows data-mining around the unique resolved-stories dataset we have.

If you want to dive straight into the technical description please go visit our API page

The three calls we have exposed so far are,

• url_info – This allows developers to take any URL posted to twitter and get back the title, category, tweet count, date posted and the resolved URL.
• recent – Grabs the most recent stories from Tweetmeme
• popular – Grabs the most popular stories from Tweetmeme

If you wish to get updates on further developers follow tweetmemedev

Today we will be launching a whole new revenue model based upon twitter. Our popular story aggregator Tweetmeme is allowing paying customers to sponsor a story. This can either be a story of their choice e.g. a link to a blog post, website or they can sponsor any link/story already within Tweetmeme. Using the Direct Message functionality the sponsor sends Tweetmeme the URL of the story they wish to sponsor, they can only sponsor a new story every 24 hours.

The sponsors story is listed in the sidebar on the frontpage and the story is specially highlighted in our ‘recent stories’ to show it is sponsored.

We believe this gives businesses and brands a unique way to attach their twitter account to their own stories or stories which relates to them. Tweetmeme which has RSS feeds, a twitter account which pushes stories and a slick interface gives those new to social media an easy route to build a presence on twitter.

At the same time as launching the revenue model we also release a range of new features that make tweetmeme the service even more attractive to its users.

• New ‘recent stories’ default frontpage
• New ‘incoming stories’ see new links as they flow into tweetmeme
• Better RSS feed – includes blog excerpts, retweet button and thumbnails.

That on top of the other recent features that makes tweetmeme the best in class.

• Mobile version – http://m.tweetmeme.com – [more details]
• Button + WordPress Plugin – our unique retweet + tweet count button makes it easy for users to retweet onto twitter
• Categorized Content
• Thumbnails for images/videos