We are pleased to announce that today all comments left on TweetMeme will get shortened with the URL http://rep.ly – this will be exclusively used for comments so your followers when seeing a comment will always know you have just left a comment on TweetMeme.
Secondly we have made the integration with Twitter even better now allowing you to seamlessly reply to any Tweet on twitter that was associated with a particular story. This means you can quickly start a conversation with those who are already interested in that story.
Features
Each comment can be retweeted (either within TweetMeme or back on Twitter by retweeting the rep.ly link)
rep.ly exclusively used for comments
You can reply to more than one twitter user
Can reply to tweets + comments at the same time
Can embed video, images + stories
Thread view for individual comments
Live-updates
You can join the discussion on the new features here
Did you know that when you are logged into TweetMeme (via Twitter OAuth) that the retweet button becomes even simpler to use, No? Well I have recorded a very quick video that explains the difference between logged-in and logged-out
Amongst the many new features we launched as part of V2 was the new bookmarklet – this is a really simple button that you drag into your bookmark toolbar on your browser – and when you are on any blog, video, image – in fact any website you can press the TweetMeme button and it will take you to the story page for that site back onto TweetMeme, that then gives you a quick and easy way to RETWEET or comment.
I have included the Bookmarklet below – just click and drag it onto your bookmark toolbar.
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
click to enlarge
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
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.
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.
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
click screenshot to enlarge
We thought long and hard on how we could introduce comments to TweetMeme that would meet a number of goals including our retweet functionality.
Reply mechanism that feels familiar to Twitter users
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.
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.
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.
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.
