Image via Wikipedia

This evening whilst at a roller disco (don’t ask!) i heard the news that Michael Jackson had been taken to hospital and early reports were pronouncing him dead.

In order to keep up with the stories and what was becoming news I went back to the Michael Jackson channel that I creates to follow the news around his concerts. No surprise but it’s now starting to fill up with the latest confirmed and unconfirmed stories.

Keep up to date with it here: Michael Jackson Channel

The shortlist for the TechCrunch Europe Europa awards are now up and we’ve been nominated in three categories so we really need the help and support of all our users!!!  We need you all to vote for us!

The Twitter application and design space is a hugely competitive market and we love good friendly competition.  So please pop over to TechCrunch to cast your votes!  And rememeber that every vote counts!  So please ask your friends, family and colleagues to also cast their vote!

The categories that you’ll find us in are:

The Europas: Best Web Application Or Service (EMEA)

The Europas: Best Design

The Europas: Best New Startup, Summer 2008-2009

Please vote for us and share the love by re-tweeting this article!

Today we have pushed two new and exciting updates to TweetTabs, which we hope everyone will love.

Sharing

We are very excited with the release of sharing, you can now easily share all your tabs with your friends, your bookmark your set of tabs so you can read them from any computer.

This opens up a whole load of new possibilities which you can do with TweetTabs.

Yip Support

Yip is a plugin for Firefox which allows website to push notifications, through Growl in MacOS and through Firefox in everything else. You can read more about the YIP plugin, and download it on the homepage.

TweetTabs uses Yip to push notifications to your desktop of new tweets. Every 60 seconds (if you have any notifications) a popup box will let you know how many new tweets there are and the break down of how many tweets each tab has got.

Other Notes

Last week we doubled the API capacity of TweetTabs, you can now have more tabs open which update faster.

IE7 Support, we are still working on getting TweetTabs to work correctly in IE7, in the meantime we recommend either updating to IE8 or using Firefox/Safari/Chrome/Opera.

Please let us know what you think and give us feedback on current features and what you would like to see in the future. Remember to follow @tweettabs on Twitter.

If you keep a close eye on TweetMeme, you may have noticed a gap in service between 9:30 and 10:00 BST today. It appears we suffered some networking problems which took down the site between these times.

TweetTabs and all TweetMeme services (including buttons) were affected in this. We apologies for any problems this may have caused, and are working with our hosting provider to ensure we minimise these kind of events.

Update: The issue was caused by a power outage that affected much of Reading, UK. Some core networking equipment didn’t behave correctly when switching over to backup power supply.

Today we launched http://TweetTabs.com, a new web-based twitter search + trends client. It is a simple, ultra fast and ultra leightweight interface to search and trends for Twitter. It also incorporates integration with TweetMeme to show previews of stories so you can be sure on what you are viewing. TweetTabs was born from ‘20% project’ created by our designer/JavaScript Samurai @dtsn (twitter.com/dtsn)

Core features

• tabs! open as many individual tabs with different search results in each
• Integration with the TweetMeme API to allow users to preview short url’s (including ability to one-click retweet if you are logged into tweetmeme)
• drag/drop each tab to change ordering
• one-click trending topics to open new ‘tabs’
• Retweet, View Profile, Reply to tweets (via the twitter web interface)
• Remembers your tabs between sessions
• Adaptive search poll rate (we make sure we don’t kill the twitter search even with lots of tabs open)

TweetTabs marks the start of a range of complimentary services that we will be launching over the coming months.

We’ve been tracking the progress of the AT & T IPhone Twitition recently to find out how long it takes for a single story to run to 10, ooo re-tweets and interestingly Patrick Altoft and the guys at Branded3 have been doing the same with Twitition.

The announcements that came out at the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference caused a rather large backlash from upset IPhone customers who found that the cost of upgrade was not proportionate to the updates and new technology that come with the latest IPhone.  As such a Twitition was created for people to log their request for a sensibly priced upgrade from the IPhone 3G to the IPhone 3Gs.  There is also a similar Twitition for the O2 IPhone upgrade package.

The interesting things to note are that the US version of the Twitition has gone down a storm with over 12,812 people adding their signatures to it and had over 11,573 re-tweets which probably explains why the Twitition has gained so much traction.  Also noted over on BlogStorm is the fact that only 10% of people who visited the Twitition site actually signed the petition. Comparing this to the UK version of the same Twitition with only 5,272 signatures and 5,119 re-tweets.  So what’s different?  Is it just that O2′s offering is better than the AT&T offering or do people in the UK not like signing petitions… is it the British way not to complain, even today!  Either way it makes for some interesting stats.

When you start looking at how this traction has been trending in the last 24 hours, you can see how individual re-tweets can cause a flurry of activity around a tweet.  Bear in mind that the graph is a rolling 24 hour graph so right now it’s showing that it’s trending late at night in the UK aka when the US are awake in the graph below.

And the general trending for the Twitition can also be seen below the increases steady but related again to the time when the US are up and online.

(Graph stats from Patrick Altoft)

The AT&T iphone twitition was started on 09/06/2009 at 02:12. It hit 10,000 signatures when envyink signed it on the 12th at 08.15.

http://www.twitter.com/envyink/status/2132319527

It’s amazing how quickly trends and tweets can spread over time… Just think about it 10,000 tweets in 78 hours and 3 minutes!  It would be interesting to know what percentage of the signatories this Twitition represents for AT&T in the US and will they be making any changes in their contracts as a result.

You can read more about the Twititon over on BlogStorm.

We are on the hunt for intersting, unusual or useful places where you are finding our re-tweet button.  This week has been no exception, interestingly we found that we are now on the Sky Blogs site of all places.  So if you happen to read any of the sky blogs like “The Weather Girls” for example then you can now re-tweet whatever they are talking about!

As you may have already heard we are also on Governor Schwarznegger’s newsroom pages where you can read about his suggestion of replacing textbooks with digital books.  Interestingly that particular story was re-tweeted via our button a number of times and the news of his announcement was debated over on our local radio station BBC Radio Berkshire.  Personally I’m not so sure that completely doing away with paper books is the answer but a combined mix of online text and traditional books is the best solution for me.  I wonder if the local radio station knew that he uses our button too?!  It’s funny how stories end up travelling around the world and mix with local news too.

I’ll be watching the Sky Blogs and looking out for their stories and news popping up on our local radio station or in other random places!  You never quite know where the next hot story will come from these days and Twitter has proven that time and time again.

We’re constantly looking out for sites that are using our button… anything from the most bizarre, obscure or most amusing use of our button on a site!  Where have you seen the button in use?  Where are you finding it most useful?  Are you finding any sites where you wish they had the button?  If so tell us!  We love to hear your stories about the button!

(Random Fact:) 600 million TweetMeme buttons were served last month and we are possibly one of the largest growing re-tweet sites out there at the moment. Last month we grew 120% and we are now starting to see our button pop up all over the place.

Today we updated the TweetMeme site with some new features and some UI changes.  We are hoping that this will help you find your way around the site easier and quicker as well as find additional information on re-tweets around your stories.

So first of all we added the Follow on Twitter link.  This gives users the ability to follow a specific channel or the top level TweetMeme accoount.  You’ll find the Follow next to our Subscribe button and under the Sign in area on the top right of the page.

Secondly we’ve made it easier to find our channels on TweetMeme.  So now you can find our channels in our sub menu next to the Live button, as well as down the right hand side of our site showing the top channels on TweetMeme.

We have a variety of different channels that may be of interest to our readers including the recently added World Wide Developer Conference Channel and the Le Mans racing channel amongst others.

And finally we’ve done an update on our TweetMeme button.  The basics of the button remain the same, it still does the re-tweets via the re-tweet section of the button, but now we’ve also linked the top part of the button to the story page on TweetMeme relating to that story.  This means that people can see the most recent re-tweets from people and the trending graph of re-tweets for that story.

We hope you like the updates and if you find any bugs or have any suggestions relating to these new features then please let us know over on our forum.

So that you can follow the latest news and announcements coming out of Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference we’ve set up a TweetMeme channel for the event.  The rumours have already started and people are making their predictions on what is being announced.  You’ll also find the links to the big news sites live blogging the details as they are announced.

Also if you’re on the go or prefer getting your updates via twitter, we’ve also created a twitter account just for the announcements so that you don’t miss the important news.

We are very excited to announce a new, minor release, of our WordPress plugin. We now fully support WordPress MU version 2.7 and above. We have also announced a small number of bug fixes listed below:

1. The plugin will now correctly validate for XHTML websites
2. Improved security for WordPress 2.7 installations
3. The ability to switch off the ping to TweetMeme when you update a post. This is only required if you regularly change the title of your post.
4. Improved accessibility of the plugin settings pages

We would really like to thank Eric Caron (http://linkup.com) and Jason (http://residenttourist.com) for their help making the plugin WordPress MU compatible.

This new version is now available as the development version which we welcome you to test and give us feedback on. You can download the development version from the download page.

Earlier today version 1.4.2 was accidentally pushed by WordPress (even though it wasn’t a tagged released). If you didn’t mean to upgrade we recommend downgrading back to version 1.4.1.