To co-incide with this weekend’s fun, cool and exciting Maker Faire over in Bay Area, California we’ve launched the Maker Faire TweetMeme channel.  Here you will find the top stories coming out of the event.

I’m expecting to see some of the coolest crafts and hacks seen in a long time in this stream.  It’s one of the most interesting inventor events (and if that’s not a bit of a tongue twister then I don’t know what is!) that I know of.  If you know of any other really interesting ones then do let me know.  I’m always interested to hear about them!

Personally I’m wondering when they’ll bring the Maker Faire over to the UK and Europe.  I suspect that it would go down really well over this way.  After all there’s a mad inventor in all of us.  All you need to do is watch Dragon’s Den to find that out!

I’m also putting together a list of other fun events to cover during the course of the year, so if you know of a really fun or cool event that you think we should be creating a channel for then let us know and I’ll see about creating it!

Today we launched an update to our TweetMeme Widget. We have a number of new features that are integrated into the new widget. These include the ability to filter content in the widget by category, channel and domain.  This is giving you the user far more control over the information that you show in your widget.

For those of you who have had or are currently considering purchasing one of our custom channels this means that you can now use the widget in your own site to show the content of your own channel.

Also for those of you who have larger websites along the lines of Mashable and Techcrunch, you should find that you can track the top stories on your own domain through the widget too (this is a very new feature and as such please treat it as a beta feature). See the example widget below for the Formula 1 custom channel.  Also take a look at the widget page and see how much more useful it is now than it was.

If you have feedback or suggestions on the widget then please pop here and let us know what you think.

Interested in having a custom channel built for your brand or company then get in touch and we’ll be happy to discuss this further with you.

When we were over at The Next Web, Nick Halstead CEO of TweetMeme got cornered by the guys from Intruders.tv, they spent a nice time talking about Twitter, TweetMeme and communities.

Where to get the hottest stories on Twitter? Ask Nick Halstead of TweetMeme

If you liked this video and want to put other questions to Nick then leave them in the comments area and we’ll see what we can do about putting the questions to him and getting the questions and answers up here too!

This Wednesday a really important conference takes part in London, Media 140 is one of the first in a
wave of twitter/micro-blogging related conferences. Twitter has shown massive growth and has quickly become a key source of real-time news for a lot of people.

Every major news agency has an account on twitter and many breaking news stories have been sourced from twitter. The reality of the changes in journalism is well documented including the current desperate attempts to find a new revenue stream. All these things will be under discussion at media140. I will be speaking at the event discussing the future of micro-blogging and it’s future in breaking news.

The event will bring together journalists, bloggers, social media advocates and publishers to share and discuss the effects and impact of twitter and other social media tools on mainstream media.

The conference is a complete sell-out so the only way to get involved is of course twitter! You can follow the offical @media140 account plus on the day the #media140 tag will be used. You can also see pictures of the event on the offical flickr account.

Since the healthcare industry is so large and because the healthcare news and top stories aren’t just about swine flu we decided that it would be a good idea to create a healthcare channel on TweetMeme.  On this you will find anything from swine flu to taxation changes sorrounding the industry.

If there is a channel that you think would be a useful addition to our site then do let us know by leaving a comment here.

We are very happy today to be releasing our Twitter real-time deep link search. (quick link: http://search.tweetmeme.com ) We have been quietly building up an infrastructure that could leverage all the work we have previously done on aggregating all the links from Twitter and deep delving those links to find content and media.

We launch today with the ability to search 15+ million links which we have deep searched for content, this not only includes the text from web pages and blog posts but also videos and images.

Although the ability to keep our index totally real-time is great we also believe that the delivery of relevance is still just as important, our default search results are based upon a clever combination of newness, retweets and some other weighting factors. This means results tend to be recent and relevant but at the same time the most popular. We do also offer search by ‘Age’. Lastly you can sort the results purely by ‘retweets’ to give you the most relevant results based upon its popularity on Twitter.

Here is a quick bullet point of the key features of our search,

• Real-time search – our indexer picks up stories as they come out of Twitter
  • Boolean operators (& | – ! and grouping) – explained below
  • Sort by Best Match
  • Sort by Age
  • Sort by Retweet Count
• Filtering
  • Filter by Category
  • Filter by Media (News, Images, Videos)
  • Filter by Age (recent links first)
  • Filter by Tweets (e.g. 100+ retweets)
  • Filter by Channel (e.g. apple, start-ups)
• RSS – you can subscribe to any of the search results
• Retweet – you can retweet the links you find without leaving the site (if you are logged in via OAuth)

Some guidelines on how to use our search -> http://help.tweetmeme.com/2009/05/11/search-guidelines/

Lastly we will soon expose the engine via our API so that other developers can leverage the results.

See what the press have said already:

• TechCrunch: Tweetmeme Launches The Second Real-Time Tweet Link Search — This Hour
• VentureBeat: TweetMeme’s latest Twitter search tools take on Scoopler, OneRiot
• Mashable: Tweetmeme Shows Off the Future of Twitter Search
• Louis Gray: http://www.louisgray.com/live/2009/05/tweetmeme-launches-real-time-search.html
• CNN:  http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/05/12/future.search.engine/index.html?iref=t2test_techtues

Or just search on TweetMeme

We’ve been having a really busy day today what with the opening up of the whitelist, analysing the stats and creating new channels.  Today’s new channel is a Startup’s channel.  If you are interested in startup’s and VC’s then this is going to be the channel for you.  Please bear in mind these are any type of startups from technology through to a New Roller Derby team being formed.

Enjoy!

Prior to today we had a restriction on the TweetMeme Button that all tweets were re-tweeted as RT @tweetmeme with the exception of those on the whitelist where they could do RT @their_twitter_account which allowed the re-tweet to be from a specific twitter account/ user.  We got lots of feedback from our users… especially those who weren’t on the whitelist via our Forums and listened to their shouts!  I bet they thought we were ignoring them! (but no, we were working away to ensure that the updates worked perfectly.)

So now everyone is whitelisted and you can change it to RT @[your twitter name]. We have updated the instructions on the Button page and we have also updated the WordPress Plugin so that you change the twitter account easily. Once you have the plugin installed, go to Settings, TweetMeme and then set the Source to your twitter name. (e.g. talktweetmeme in my case) Don’t include the @ otherwise it’ll be @@talktweetmeme which wouldn’t really work.

We hope you like the update and the power it gives you as a user to see who is re-tweeting your stories and articles.  It should also mean that you could create conversation around the stories online if you add those re-tweeting your stories as friends on twitter.  I’m sure people will come up with all sorts of useful ways of using this new and very much requested feature!

Please do give us feedback and new feature requests on our Forum.  We do read every request and we try to do those that are of value to many people as soon as we can!

We’ve been continuing to keep an eye on the different URL shortener trends and thought that we would show you the effect of Twitter moving it’s default shortening service from TinyURL to Bitly.  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 todays data from Tweetmeme , and compiled the top 5 URL shorteners to give you the graph below.

The Stats:
tinyurl.com:    44.8455%
bit.ly:    43.3557%
is.gd:    5.479%
tr.im:    3.8395%
ow.ly:    2.4803%

We then went through our entire database of URL’s that we’ve seen and created the comparison graph of the overall stats for URL shorteners.  We’ll leave you to make your own conclusions about how influential Twitters choices are in terms of the services that they use and the impact that they have on companies.

And the stats behind this one:

tinyurl.com:    67.741%
bit.ly:    20.7948%
is.gd:    4.9303%
ff.im:    3.8137%
tr.im:    2.7202%

And you too can see the latest stats from TweetMeme at the bottom of our site.  The stats update on the hour every hour.  It should be of interest to anyone wanting to use the most common url shorteners then this is a good place to find out which one really is the most commonly used one.

With our latest updates much of the underlying data Tweetmeme processes has changed – most notably, we now filter stories in to categories in an effort to make stories more digestable to particular audiences.

This has a knock-on effect to our API, which has undergone a few substantial changes. While it’s never great to break backwards compatability, we feel that the additional power these changes will afford developers warrant the break. That said, we want to make the transition as smooth as possible, so we’re documenting all the changes as heavily as we can.

First off, we’ve updated the official API documentation. If you’re new to our API, this should be all you need to get started building an application on top of our data.

If you’ve already made use of our API, fear not, the changes we’ve made aren’t too drastic:

url_info

In the response: “category” has been renamed “media” to better reflect it’s purpose. The return values have also been refined to one of: “news”, “image” or “video”. Anything not classified as an “image” or “video” will generally be classified “news”. However, we may well add more types in the future.

popular, recent

As in url_info, the “category” element in the response has been renamed “media” and behaves as it does in url_info.

The parameter “category” has also been renamed “media”, which accepts either “news”, “image” or “video” – as with the equivilent response element.

categories

A new API call has been added to retrieve a tree of categories. It is described in more detail on the API documentation page.

tweets

A new API call that allows you to retrieve a paginated set of tweets for a given URL, returning a maximum of 20 tweets per page.

That’s it! If you have any problems or suggestions with any of these API calls, please let us know in the Tweetmeme API Feedback Forum