Today we launch TweetMeme V2 – we are calling it version ‘V2’ as today’s release really is a complete revamp of the site that encompasses a total rewrite of our scoring system, filtering engine and a whole raft of user interface enhancements and tweaks. It also incorporates the new commenting system which we previewed last week.

We look forward to getting all your feedback on this new version, please leave comments on this comment thread.

Ranking Content

The new site will have more varied and better quality content, this is achieved through better scoring of stories including a new ‘kudos’ score for individual Twitter users, plus we have a new ‘reporting’ mechanism allowing our users to flag content as abusive, spam or ‘This Sucks!’

Filtering

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The filtering engine is now at Version 3 codenamed ‘Pickle’ – this is our most advanced system yet allowing the real-time filtering of 10’s of millions of stories per day based upon our own programming language ‘Pickle Code’.

This release is future proof for scalability and also allows us to plug in new data sets as they become available. Included on the right is a screenshot of our tool that allows us to drag and drop rules that produces ‘Pickle Code’ – In the coming weeks we will do a feature on the architecture of this new system.

Commenting

The new commenting system also goes live, this includes the ability to retweet individual comments (when they are good!) replying to multiple users, live updates and a really tight integration into Twitter. For a full description of the commenting features previewed“>go here.

TweetMeme is also working with the team at JS-Kit to import the comments into the Echo Stream. TweetMeme will also be recommending and distributing Echo as the preferred solution to track the distributed conversation on blogs.

From Khris Lous CEO of JS-Kit

Echo is commited to re-assembling the distributed conversation back to blogs and other sites – working with TweetMeme is a natural step along that path

Features Overview

• The new ‘retweeting’ commenting platform
• A new user timeline that shows retweets and comments in a river.
• V3 of our Filtering Engine, codenamed ‘Pickle’
• Better RSS feeds (by Category, Channel, User or Domain)
• Simple story analytics (to be followed next week with full analytics package)
• A new bookmarklet that lets you find any webpage back on TweetMeme.
• A new ‘tweets’ analyzer that only shows ‘unique’ tweets for one particular story.

10:32:40 AM: Today we will be doing a maintenance update of our TweetMeme site #TweetMemeV2 as we know you like to know what’s going on we’re tweeting it

10:36:55 AM: Looks like we’re all set to get started!

10:39:08 AM: TweetMeme is now down and the buttons will be up for now still.

10:39:44 AM: And the buttons that are new will show the Maintenance button #TweetMemeV2

10:40:01 AM: System back up done! #TweetMemeV2

10:44:27 AM: Now for the big stuff! #TweetMemeV2

10:51:46 AM: Why is it that the post arrives mid upgrade and live tweet! It seems to all be going very smoothly so far… Fingers Crossed #TweetMemeV2
10:55:52 AM: Now for the code updates… they look like they are upgrading OK atm… The dev team are checking they are all there! #TweetMemeV2

11:01:59 AM: So what does everyone think of the new logo ? You’ll see we’ve updated it over on the TweetMeme twitter account http://retwt.me/pN
11:04:31 AM: TweetMeme will be back soon! http://bit.ly/ClXQy
via @tweetmeme

11:04:43 AM: TweetMeme Maintenance Live Update http://bit.ly/wnNjX
via @tweetmeme

11:07:17 AM: Do we want more pics of the team working hard? #TweetMemeV2

11:12:42 AM: So you’ve already seen Alex doing his thing… Now for Nick T our in house Mylie Cyrus fan… #TweetMemeV2 http://twitpic.com/fjwqd

11:16:04 AM: I have a feeling @nicktelford is probably going to hide now he’s been outed! http://is.gd/2DJ99

11:19:53 AM: If you’re wondering what’s going on we’re still upgrading. It does take a while to do though! The team have been working hard! #TweetMemeV2

11:24:12 AM: You should hear the silence in the office as everyone is beavering away! Just the tap tapping of keyboards! #TweetmemeV2

11:39:37 AM: Checking our spam filter settings & a few other bits now…#TweetmemeV2

11:50:40 AM: We’re now testing everything to make sure it’s all working properly!

12:01:44 PM: We can hear the dull tones of #readingfestival from our offices! I’m amazed we can hear it as it’s a few miles away! #TweetMemeV2

12:08:03 PM: Team motivation to get the site back up online #TweetMemeV2 http://twitpic.com/fjzzn

12:11:04 PM: RT @alexforrow: @talkTweetMeme http://twitpic.com/fjv3c – Yeah makes me look like some kind of milk addict <- he’s our milk fiend!

12:11:53 PM: RT @stewarttownsend: http://bit.ly/u9SNK The Story of Tweetmeme #tweetmemev2

12:33:54 PM: We have content in our test area! And are looking to go live very, very soon!

12:50:15 PM: The first thing to go online will be our API. THe rest will follow.

1:27:05 PM: The buttons should be starting to come back up and the API should be working but is currently rate limited.

5:49:09 PM: Not quite as simple an update as we hoped but buttons are being served & the API is running. The site update is a bit tricker but is coming

7:39:42 PM: And finally the main site is about to go live! Wait for it! …..

7:42:11 PM: We’ll be doing a count down!

7:42:35 PM: 3, 2, 1, go!

7:45:59 PM: http://tweetmeme.com

7:47:37 PM: Thanks to all the TweetMeme team for all their hard work today! I know it’s been a long hard few weeks getting it all finished!
7:54:41 PM: We hope everyone likes it and do let us know about any site bugs over on the forum http://help.tweetmeme.com/forum

TweetMeme is currently unavailable as we are performing a system upgrade.

This will have an impact on the service we provide, so please read this post carefully before you post any support requests at this time.  Please read on to find out how this will impact you.

User Impact

First of all, all webpages at TweetMeme.com will display a holding page until the upgrade is complete.  The API will also also be down, but will still return a failure message in the requested format. Buttons displayed on websites will exhibit one of a number of behaviours, so please examine these carefully before you ask for support for a broken button.
Button Behaviours

If your URL was known to TweetMeme before the upgrades began, we will still attempt to serve the last known Retweet count on your button. When users click on the Retweet part, they will be directed to Twitter where they can post the Tweet about the story. However, during the period of downtime, button counts *will not* increment as you would usually expect. When we come back online we will try our best to retrieve as many Tweets that were posted while we were offline as possible, however we will miss some of them (we estimate about 10 minutes worth). The button counts will start changing again as we come back online after the upgrades are complete.

If your URL was not know to TweetMeme before the upgrades started, you will see a special TweetMeme button with a spanner icon instead of the usual count. This is expected behaviour and will be displayed until the upgrade is complete and TweetMeme picks up your URL, when it will start displaying Retweet counts as usual.

There may also be some buttons displaying question marks, these will be picked up by TweetMeme and will begin displaying as expected when the upgrades are complete.

We’d like to thank everyone for their patience and understanding while these necessary upgrades are performed, and we hope you enjoy the improved functionality and response speed of the TweetMeme site and button in the future.

To follow our progress we will live tweet updates here: http://blog.tweetmeme.com and status updates for our services will be on http://status.tweetmeme.com

We have just updated our latest pet project Retwt.me with the most-requested feature of the past few days – a bookmarklet!

You can now shorten using Retwt.me from wherever on the web you happen to be. Just follow the instructions on the Bookmarklet page and you’ll be on your way in seconds.

We’ve also made a small change to the Analyse page – you can now put just an Alias (e.g. the “1″ in http://retwt.me/1) to quickly get Stats for a short URL.

If you have any other feature requests be sure to let us know – try the support forum, Twitter, or Contact Us.

We are soon launching a new TweetMeme but first we have a new member of the family, retwt.me.

KISS

We like to apply the KISS principle to everything we do, and retwt.me is KISS at its best, three simple functions.

• 1. Shorten – Give us a link and in fraction of a second we will have shortened it
• 2. Share – We give you simple tools to share the link out to your favorite sites
• 3. Analyse – A simple service means easy, simple to understand analytics

Future

We have no plans to extend the service beyond these very simple principles, it will be used initially within TweetMeme to shorten comment links and added into the ‘pool’ of available shorteners.

I was testing the new site tonight and thought I would share a quick (5 min) video of using the comments. Look forward to getting your feedback and also putting this baby live! (click in bottom-right corner of video to get the high-res version.)

I wanted to share a few numbers about the growth of TweetMeme and explain why so many users are using our service. In the last 30 days we have served 1.6 billion retweet buttons, and we seeing an average growth of 20% week-on-week. The list of sites who trust our brand and our scalability read like the who’s who of the blog world The Huffingtonpost, Techcrunch, Mashable and perezhilton to name but a few.

Trusted Brand

We believe that our focus on innovation (with the help of our active community) and the continued reliability of our service is important in building a trusted brand. Below is list of the key features that differentiate us.

• One-Click retweeting
• RSS + Email Buttons
• A range of plugins both by us and 3rd party developers.
• Integrated support for 11 Shortening services
• Scale supported by Sun Microsystems
• 24 hour support from our Team on Twitter on our dedicated support forum
• Enterprise Features for larger sites

Future

We know that publishers/blogs use our button to get further traction, but that is only one side of the coin. How do you know if your story was a success beyond just the retweet count? We have been working with partners to build a analytics package that is tailored for our users to understand how’s and why’s of the spread of a story. We will be starting a private beta next week (at same time as the Public release of the new version of TweetMeme), for now I have included a few sample screenshots.

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Many people have said that the comments left on blogs are often better than the blog post itself, so when we started looking at commenting on TweetMeme our primary goal was to allow good quality comments to be retweeted.

So today we are giving a sneak peek into one aspect of the new TweetMeme release which is coming early next week that fulfills that vision and a whole lot more.

Commenting

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We thought long and hard on how we could introduce comments to TweetMeme that would meet a number of goals including our retweet functionality.

1. Promotion of quality comments
2. Works seamlessly with Twitter
3. Reply mechanism that feels familiar to Twitter users
4. Ability to embed media into comments

Retweeting

I am sure everyone has found that discussions on blogs ‘can’ be absolutely compelling and that it is not unusual to find single comments that run to numbers of pages and would in themselves often warrant being their own blog post. These often go overlooked by a large proportion of readership that doesn’t have the time to read through all the comments on a single story.

Just like our normal story retweet functionality each Twitter user can only retweet a comment once (i.e. one vote per user). Within TweetMeme this means a simple one-click retweet which we send on your behalf behind the scenes, for users on Twitter they can retweet the unique link that points at that comment and we will count any further retweets towards the total. This gives an individual comment the same chance of spreading virally as any normal story.

Finally we make it possible to switch from the default ordered by date, to a ordered by ‘retweets’ so for a particular story see the most popular comments. On a story with hundreds of comments we think just like TweetMeme the ability to filter by the retweet popularity will be valuable in finding the quality comments.

Replying

We love the simplicity of Twitter and especially the ability to reply to multiple people. We wanted to duplicate this within TweetMeme but also make it quicker + simpler for new users. So all you have to do is click on the ‘reply’ button and the name of the person gets put in a ‘TO:’ box, click on another reply (on a different comment) and that name will also be added.

And just like Twitter you can click on ‘Replies’ (Twitter now calls it ‘mentions’) and you will only see the comments that have been directed back at you. On top of this when you post a comment on TweetMeme it also sends a Tweet to Twitter which includes the @[name] of each Twitter user, so even if they are not on TweetMeme at the time to see that you have replied, they will see it on back on Twitter (or any clients such as TweetDeck.)

Media Simplicity

We love short URL’s for their tracking and ability to be easily spread about the social web. For the average user they can also hide the final content and result in them not getting clicked. When we sat down and thought how we could encourage the embedding of media and the use of short URL’s the solution was simple, just use inherent ability of TweetMeme to un-shorten and aggregate the content at the end of the link.

You can see from the example above that the comment includes three links which have been annotated and reference the list of media below the content. When I wrote the comment I actually copy + pasted three short URL’s but TweetMeme went and un-shortened them. Then went and found the content associated with the links, e.g. title, body of the post and any media attached.

And Finally

This is only part of a major overhaul to TweetMeme that includes our 3rd generation of news filtering, new and much improved spam detection, improvements in search and a whole host of other smaller changes. We thank everyone who continues to support us and uses our Retweet Button. You can be sure we will continue to innovate in this space.