Archive for July, 2009
You know you are doing something right when people start copying you! It is said that copying is the sincerest form of flattery, so when I did my daily read of the tech blogs this morning I was of course interested to read on Techcrunch that retweet.com will soon be entering the fray and that it looked suspiciously like TweetMeme.
I had actually been contacted by their COO Tyson Quick in April to ask if we would support their plan to get twitter to support retweeting natively on Twitter. At the time I responded that I would think about it, in fact what I thought was that they were obviously trying to get us to help them promote a service that would at a later stage turn into a competitor, so I ignored it.
What caught my attention was that some industrious individual (@travisketchum) had left a comment on the TechCrunch article that he had been doing some digging around on the website and had found a link to their development environment. What we found ourselves was that our retweet button Javascript and the Wordpress plugin code seemed to have been directly copied from ours.
We are happy for others to learn from our endeavors and flattered by the copying but some of our more complex JavaScript was obfuscated to deter others from attempting to re-use our code. We take a dim view of trying to pass off our code especially when it is attempting to create a competitor.
We our seeking further legal advice and will be pursuing every avenue to protect the hard work of our team.
It was decided today that we don’t tell you enough about what goes on behind the scenes at TweetMeme; in other words, what we do in the office when we aren’t busy keeping you updated with the latest Twitter news and making sure the site works well!
So, here is a quick rundown of the past couple of days…
The first thing to mention is that @nicktelford celebrated his birthday this week! He was brought some pink balloons and some lovely presents which all related to his favourite celebrity — Miley Cyrus. Needless to say he was ecstatic when he opened them! To make his day even better we then played his new Miley Cyrus CD… unfortunately that was short lived due to “noise” complaints from other companies in the building. Clearly they didn’t appreciate Miley as much as we did!
In other news… when I started working for TweetMeme almost 3 weeks ago I was a girl with a slight Facebook obsession. Unfortunately, working for a company which runs a Twitter app, this was not acceptable for certain members of the TweetMeme team (*cough* @dtsn and @chris_alexander). So 6 days ago they started the process of “converting” me over to Twitter. While I hate to admit it, they were successful, and I now have two programmes on my computer which will keep me updated with Twitter, as well as my Twitter homepage permenantly being open on my browser. This caused everyone at TweetMeme to use Twitter as the “water cooler”… rather than turning around to talk to one another, we now just converse via Twitter instead… (talking is so overrated!!)
Finally, the TweetMeme Nazbatag Bunny needs a special mention. She is currently taking a holiday to the other end of the office, so has been keeping me entertained and Chris annoyed for the past week… it has been very fun making her send Twitter updates of the wrong time! Today Chris did something very foolish and created a programme which allows us to send messages that Bunny will read out (something tells me he immediately regretted it!). If you want to see what Bunny is saying to all of us, feel free to follow her via Twitter.
I am releasing a couple of new channels today; the first one to be launched is the NASA channel. The channel is quickly filling with interesting content, and I am sure this will be a popular channel for people who are interested in space and science. Follow the NASA channel here!
The second new channel is the Facebook channel, which I am sure will be popular with fans of social media — I know this is a channel which I’m interested in, and I am sure others at Tweetmeme will be too given the discussions in the office the past week! If you want to find out more about what is happening in the social media world, then you will want to check this channel out! Click here to follow the Facebook channel!
Following the announcement of Microsoft Office 2010 a few weeks ago, I decided it was time to create a channel dedicated to it, as the river was flooding with the latest stories. This channel also contains the latest stories about Microsoft 7, I am sure this will be a popular channel amongst the computer techies out there! Click here to follow the latest stories on the Microsoft Office 2010 channel!
The final channel going live today is the Recession and Economy channel. As this is an issue which is going to be affecting everyone in the forseeable future, I expect this will be a popular channel. Follow the Recession and Economy channel to keep up-to-date with the latest stories!
There are a couple of new channels today; the first is a Harry Potter channel, which I was personally very excited about creating! Following the release of the latest movie in the series (The Half-Blood Prince) last week, the river has been filling up with stories about the famous fictional wizard.
To follow the latest reviews of the film, and news about the characters and the final two films, check out the Harry potter channel
With the Ashes 2009 well under way, the second new channel for today is dedicated to the famous cricketing event. I am sure this new channel will be popular with our users who are also sporting fans.
To keep up to date with the 2009 Ashes, take a look at the Ashes 2009 channel
The final new channel I am releasing today is the Climate Change channel. As this is a popular topic currently over the news it seemed an appropriate channel to launch.
To find out the latest developments about Climate Change, and see what you can do to help, visit the Climate Change channel.
I wrote a little while back that we would be soon launching some new variants of our popular retweet button. We have had the new versions in test since then and can today announce their public availability.
RSS & Email
The current Retweet Button is designed to be embedded in web pages and uses Javascript to make it do a few clever things (such as logged-in retweeting). The problem with Javascript is that it cannot be used within RSS or Emails as most RSS & email clients strip Javascript for security reasons. So we came up with the idea of rendering our button as an image which would allow you to embed it anywhere that would accept an image. We hope this new variant of the button will help you get even more retweets.
You can read how to implement the RSS button, and how to the implement the Email Button.
Plugin
To make life easier we have added support for the RSS button to our WordPress plug-in – if you already have the plugin installed you will see a whole load of new options including the new RSS functionality, you can turn it on/off and also position it separately within the RSS.
Shortening Services
We also previewed last week that we were adding support for choosing your own short url service. This has also now gone live and you can read the full instructions. We already support 11 services (listed below) plus 3 services in which you can also supply an API key so that the data is private to yourself. If you run one of these services which is not supported please get in touch.
Plugin
If you are using the WordPress Plug-in already you will find settings to specify the shortener.
Wordpress Statistics
Lastly you will notice that we have added a whole new page within our WordPress plug-in that gives statistics about retweeting for your last 5 posts. This gives you the 24 hour retweet trend graph for each story and a list of twitter users who have tweeted the story (useful in getting back in touch with those users who like your content.)
Success
We would like to thank everyone who has so far installed our button, we are currently serving over 50 million button impressions per day and it continues to grow daily. If you have any feedback on the new features please drop us a comment or head over to our discussion forum.
The new retweet chicklet is now live! what is it? It shows the total number of retweets that a particular website gets in the course of a single week. It comes in the standard 88×26px size and you can customize the colour of the chicklet to suite your website design.
We think this is a great simple addition to our other widgets and buttons and hope people will proudly display their retweet count for all to see.
How
We have made it dead simple for you to embed, just go to this page and type in the domain of your website, click on the RGB color value to pick a different colour, hit the ‘generate button’ and when your happy with the results cut and paste the HTML onto your own website.
Show Us
When you have added the chicklet please drop a comment back on this post so we can highlight some of the best sites in a future blogpost
Although my golfing knowledge is limited, many of our Tweetmeme users do share an interest in Golf. With the beginning of the 2009 British Open today, I decided ths was a great opportunity to set up a new channel, especially as the river is going to be full of the latest golf stories from the British Open!
Follow this channel to keep up to date with the latest from the British Open.
Today I launched a new channel which is bound to be a popular channel with our Tweetmeme users, as it will give you all the top stories about wine!
The channel will give you information about wines, provide updates about upcoming wine events, and inform you about the health advantages (and risks) about drinking wine. Keep up to date with this exciting new channel here: Wine Channel
Firstly I shall introduce myself; my name is Kate and I am responsible for Sales and Marketing here at TweetMeme. This is my first blog post so I hope you enjoy!
I have been working for TweetMeme for two months now and enjoying myself immensely. The digital space is a little bit of a challenge but I love being on board and learning lots.
Sarah (community manager) and I, headed to London for the Reboot Britain event – an event designed after the publication of the much talked about Digital Britain document. Held at Savoy place and nearing 300 delegates – it was an exciting event with many leaders and innovators in this area.
With as many as 8 lecture rooms, it meant that we had much choice – and you could plan a programme designed for your interests and what you wanted to learn about. There was an ongoing Twitter stream (#rebootbritain) that meant there was constant (and sometimes amusing) commentary, and some great speakers. Personal favourites of mine were Martha Lane- Fox, Jon Gisby, Charles Leadbeater and Alan Moore. But terribly upset I managed to miss Howard Rheingold…This was Sarah’s highlight of the day.
Uploaded by 'Rain Rabbit' on Flickr
Martha Lane Fox was talking about attempting to bridge the digital divide and the importance of this so that we do not create an underclass of those that do not have access to the online space. She was a really inspiring speaker and I will be interested in hearing about the future of this and how the Government attempts to tackle this issue.
Jon Gisby focused upon Channel 4s interactive space, how they are planning to achieve a successful campaign in the digital space, and how it is important for Britain to be influential and innovative to compete in the international web market. Much of this was focused around the importance for investment and funding for small, creative, (and British!) start-ups.
Charles Leadbeater spoke about the lesser importance of Traditional Media in a highly amusing talk. He spoke about how the traditional media space is changing. He talked about ‘Mutual Media’ and the need for companies and media sources to mutualise themselves by taking interactive and engaging ideas, and producing sources of this alongside social media strategies, and traditional media. Very insightful and it was nice to hear that TweetMeme is heading along the right track for helping brands and corporations to go in this direction.
One of the products here at TweetMeme is our ability to produce interactive and engaging ‘channels’ of content and verticals coming out of Twitter; A space where brands and media sources can engage with content, and those Twitter users that are talking about them. What was great from this event was realising how important this could be. Our channels can be custom made, skinned to look like particular websites, and to follow any #hashtags and keywords. One thing that did come up during the day was the need for tools and platforms to make this happen. This is something we can do!
It felt almost revolutionary being a part of the event and to witness the things being said. According to Alan Moore we are in a ‘Communication Evolution’ and that the new online media could be an ‘agent of political and social change.’ And that to ‘Reboot Britain’ we would need to replace a culture of blame with a culture of responsibility. The industry is moving so fast, and is such a learning curve for corporations – and people alike. Traditional organisations are suffering, especially in the current economic climate and they need to turn to other areas to reassess what will work for them. The problem for these traditional organisations is that they need coherent strategies, and that they are used to running with silos and with hierarchies without taking advantage of the new human potential of communication. Taking inspiration from start- ups are important for these corporations to help establish different ways of experimentation. The problem with this is that they cannot afford for something to not work.
Uploaded by 'RainRabbit' on Flickr
My colleague Sarah was reminded by Mike Earls of Herd of the 70, 20, 10 rule which seems ever more applicable in this new emerging industry. This rule refers to how agencies should spend their budget; 70% on what is known to work, 20% on innovation from what does work, and 10% on experimentation and trying new ideas. To remain innovative and competitive, agencies would have to do this. So if you want to try a new pioneering proposition, contact me! kate@tweetmeme.com or @TweetMemeSales.
Despite being an interesting day, it was not without its limitations; as anyone there will tell you. The internet was unreliable, and the audience was not as representative as one would have hoped. I think it would have made a real impact having some younger speakers and delegates there.
But what was great about Reboot was that it was a chance to explore new ideas together, new processes, and new strategies to make our society an open one. We should inspire to be able to engage with individuals/companies/public sector organisations in this way. If our different industry sectors are dysfunctional then we will not be able to produce technologies to take us forward, or implement them in a successful manner.
Whatever people think about short url’s we think they are here to stay, not only are they handy for fitting into your tweets they are also an invaluable way to track users behavior throughout social media. Each short url can be tracked as it is passed about by users. Data can be built up on when and who clicked through and where they all came from, this in turn lets marketeers track the success or failure of their campaigns.
Shortening 101
We have been working for several months behind the scenes with a whole range of the short url services so that we could bring publishers a unique range of services built upon the most popular of these services. So far TweetMeme has either taken whatever short url it first spotted, and or we re-shortened via a shortlist of highly reliable + scalable services (e.g. bit.ly). You have all been vocalising your desire to customize this and we have been listening.
Included in the next release (happening this week) is the ability to choose which short url you want. For automated shortening we support 7 of the most popular shortening services and will be adding more over the coming weeks. On top of that we already support personalized shortening (where you supply an API key so that the tracking data is then individual to yourself) for 3 of those services. And again we will continue to work with our partners to add further support.
And best of all, all of them work with our ‘One-Click’ retweet that lets users retweet without leaving the site the button is on.
As we announced last Friday we are also releasing the ability to place retweet buttons in RSS & Emails
If you run a shortening service or have one that your would like to see supported please get in touch or via @tweetmemedev.
