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