Back at the beginning of 2009 we produced a little green web button that counted how many times users shared a link on Twitter. We started out with a simple idea ‘How can we get more people to share content on Twitter’ – and today we return to that simple thought.

We have grown to more than 750 million daily retweet button impressions, which for a tiny team is an amazing achievement. That said the market requires an official solution that can accelerate this growth. So today Twitter is launching its own Tweet Button and we are very pleased to be partnering with them to continue to grow the overall Twitter ecosystem.

What does this mean? Firstly we will be assisting Twitter with the technical challenges involved with the button and secondly we will be working even more closely in the future on delivering real-time curation of the Twitter Firehose. This will manifest itself in the launch of a number of new products and the first of these is being unveiled today.

DataSift gives developers the ability to leverage cloud computing to build very precise streams of data from the millions and millions of tweets sent every day.

• Tune tweets through a graphical interface or our bespoke programming language
• Streams consumable through our API and real-time HTTP
• Comment upon and rank streams created by the community
• Extend one or more existing streams to create super streams

Find out more on the new DataSift blog or follow @datasift

For press enquiries send emails to press (at) tweetmeme.com

UPDATE:

Robert Scoble has posted a video interview with Nick Halstead, Founder of TweetMeme discussing the Twitter Buttons and the new product DataSift.

We are fast approaching a major milestone in Retweet Buttons and within weeks we will have passed being live on over 200,000 websites. In conjunction we have recently passed serving 500 million button impressions daily. To assist our continued growth we are today releasing a major update to the button to include international language support.

Two parts of the button have translation features,

Firstly the button itself and the pop-up you get when you click to do the retweet are now translated into 7 languages English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese and Portuguese. We will then be putting up an area to crowd source the translations to other languages.

Secondly we have integrated Google Translate to automatically translate any stories you retweet into your own language. This automatically detects if translation is required and prompts you when it has made the change, it is a simple one-click to revert the translation if that is not what you desire.

The new language support is on top of an impressive feature set,

• The best user and publisher retweets experience
• URL Shortener Support (including BIT.LY Pro)
• Mobile Phone Support (iPhone, Android)
• Image Button – that allows the embedding into RSS + Emails
• Spaces – allows you to control how many white spaces you leave at the end of the tweet
• Hash Tag support

If you are website owner you can read all the technical details of the changes on our help page, if you want to install the button from scratch visit our installation page.

UPDATE

As some of you who already use our button with the language translation are already aware we initially released our translations as an opt out, due to the popular demand for an opt in process instead we have now swapped that around so you can now opt into your tweets being translated into your local language.

Today are launching the really useful TweetMeme Twitter Follow Button, this feature will help you and your readers to find and follow one another on Twitter!  The button has been designed for simplicity and comes in three styles as shown below.  The Follow button does not redirect the user to Twitter it instead uses the Twitter OAuth access just like our ReTweet button.

The Follow Button also has a live counter so that you can see visually if the user is worth following just based upon the count and matches the style and ability of the TweetMeme ReTweet button.  The Follow button also knows who you are already following and shows the + sign to remind you to add the new users that you discover through the Follow Button.  After all it is also a comfort to know yes, I am already following them, or how did I forget to follow this user! I must add them!

Compact: 

Normal:

Square:

Once clicked on the follow button provides you with the following features:

• Twitter Profile Picture
• Real Name
• Twitter Username
• Twitter profile description
• Following / Follower Count
• Recent Links that have been retweeted

The button also integrates with three of the most popular Twitter user profiling systems to provide you with some great additional user analysis tools to help you decide whether you want to follow people.

Twitter Counter

Twitter Counter is a great way to visually understand how a Twitter user is gaining extra followers.

Twitalyzer

Twitalyzer lets you at a glance see how a Twitter user interacts, giving simple metrics on Engagement, Impact and Influence.

Twitter Grader

Twitter Grader takes a Twitter and compares you with every other Twitter user based upon power and reach and gives you a overall grade.

Alongside the new button which is currently available as Javascript for you to embed into your site, we have also created a WordPress Plugin and anticipate other plugins will follow.  The WordPress plugin is designed to dramatically increase the scope of the follow button by improving the take up by the ‘long tail’.

The plugin is an easy opportunity for users to use the button.  The plugin provides 3 useful features, the biggest of which is the ability to replace the standard comment avatar with a follow button. We also add in a WordPress sidebar widget and the ability to add the follow button to posts on a per-author basis.

Sidebar Widget

Settings

Sometime in February our Retweet Button passed the 100,000 mark in website installs. We launched the Retweet Button back in February 2009 – so we have achieved this milestone in 12 months. We also peaked at 300 million retweet buttons served in one day (thanks to the iPad) and in the last 30 days we have served over 7 Billion buttons.

We are very proud to have some of the biggest brands on the internet using our services below are just a few of them.

Flash

I would also like to single out one company that has taken us into a whole new Arena, BREAK.COM worked with us to produce the very first Flash based Retweet Button, this has been a massive success for them increasing retweets by a factor of five. Look out for more innovation in this space.

New Functionality

To mark our milestone we are launching two really important bits of functionality that allow even more customization of the Tweets that are generated.

The first is HASHTAGS – we have long wanted to allow users to be able to tag each button so that users searching for relevant articles have a chance of finding them. You can now add one (or more) tags and we will automatically append them to the Tweet while still keeping within the 140 Character Limit. We are also pushing out an update today of our ever popular WordPress Plugin that adds automatic support for taking your WordPress TAGS and adding them to the Tweet Text.

Secondly we have added the ability to pre-allocate space at the end of the Tweet, it is a well known fact that Links get retweeted more when space is left at the end of the Tweet to then allow the next person to add the RT @[twitter_name] to the beginning, so from now on by default the Tweet will leave 19 characters, this can be overridden to give more or less space.

Both pieces of new functionality work on all our variants of the Button (Web, RSS, Mobile) and you can get all the details on HashTags and Tweet Space – or our main Button help page here.

Feature List

For those unaware of all the great abilities our button has here is a quick run-down on what makes us unique

• The Biggest and recognized Retweet Brand
• Installed on 100,000+ websites worldwide
• The best User + Publisher Retweet Experience
• 100% accurate retweet counts
• Support for 15 Different URL Shorteners
• Web, RSS, Email and Mobile support
• New support for HashTags + Whitespace

It always amazes me how things converge onto a point in what seems to be complete coincidence, but when it happens time and again you see that it is just a natural convergence of multiple minds pushing forward ideas towards a natural conclusion.

And so when I arrived at the Techcrunch Crunchup I was not surprised to find that a number of companies (including Twitter themselves ) would be talking about Twitter based advertising.

I was also at the Crunchup to announce our own new Twitter advertising model called Adtweets – which is a new ad-platform that allows established ad-networks to leverage the power of the retweet (something we feel we have extensive knowledge within.) by allowing current display adverts to gain a retweetable element. If you want to read the full details we have a separate post.

Retweet Analytics

I wanted to share some fascinating numbers on how content gets disseminated across twitter via Retweets, we recently launched our own Analytics package that allows individual stories to be analysed in great detail.

An interesting fact that has an immense impact for anyone trying to advertise on Twitter is that when I analysed 20 of the top tier Twitter accounts (e.g. with followers of more than 500,000) I found that on average only 35% of the retweets that a link gained were directly originated from their own Twitter account.

So as an example a recent Mashable story with 1598 retweets I found that only 586 were a direct result of their pushing it out to the@mashable Twitter account (which has 1,751,213 followers) and the largest proportion (825 of them) was in fact from originating retweets (e.g. clicking our retweet button).

The second interesting set of numbers is the click data that then results from all those retweets – again from the same story we find that it was clicked 12558 times (split across 5 different shortener services) of that total 8196 were direct (e.g. mostly from Twitter clients such as Seesmic, Tweetdeck) 2896 were from the Twitter.com and the 1539 were from 80+ other Twitter web based clients.

What do I draw from these facts? The first is that any model must be inclusive of external clients. So in the instance of Robert Scoble’s ‘SuperTweets‘ the Twitter clients will need a big incentive to display those adverts – e.g. a revenue share. My gut feeling is that in-tweet advertising is still the only effective route forward – just because it applies to the KISS principle.

My second conclusion is that distribution into the mainstream Twitter user-base is absolutely crucial to getting the message heard by the greatest number of users.

Lastly I would like to show you the kind of advertising that I think is the future – and that works perfectly with a model of retweeting. [disclosure: Sun Microsystems is a partner of TweetMeme]

Full details of our own advertising platform can be found here.

TweetMeme is launching Adtweets! Nick Halstead is at the Real-Time Crunchup in San Francisco today to reveal and demo our new, and exciting product! The idea behind this product was based around wanting to reward advertisers for using great, interactive and engaging adverts.  The Adtweets are a way of putting pressure on advertisers to improve the standard of adverts, and give the audience a chance to decide, and essentially vote, on what they like. Produce a good advert that your audience likes, and you can easily tap into the viral nature of Twitter and the ‘retweet effect’, which will then dramatically increase your reach.

The system is very simple and the TweetMeme Retweet Button can be integrated into any standard IAB advertisement size. Advertisers have the choice between our compact button, or our standard button…..and of course you can use our TweetMeme Analytics to easily monitor the success of your campaign. The Adtweets can be served on any website, as well as on TweetMeme.com. With the support of Federated Media there is a large pool of publishers able to give advertisers a targeted audience of  social media friendly readers, who are likely to retweet engaging adverts to their friends and Followers.

TweetMeme is also re-launching Featured Tweets….Even more powerful, to help promote particular stories, and encourage the sharing of important content to other Twitter users.  The potential value of the featured tweets was apparent in the first version, but there were some essential elements missing. After taking on board invaluable feedback from both users and customers, the service was suspended. It was back to the drawing board, and what has emerged is a new Featured Tweet system that sponsors can use to bring relevent news and stories quickly to the attention of the TweetMeme Community, who then have the opportunity to retweet the story to their Twitter Followers and so on.

The aim of this system is to give potentially viral stories a little helping hand. The improvements include better targeting of your Featured Tweet, analytics to track your story, a simple, easy to use interface, and a reduced number of sponsored stories per page.  The result? An immediate increase in exposure, an encouragement in the spread of content, increased traffic and more Twitter Followers – for sponsors….And a happier user base, with only 1 sponsored story per page.

Want to find out more, have any questions, or want to be one of the first to take advantage of this, please contact sales@tweetmeme.com!

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.

View on TweetMeme

Video Demo

I have recorded a quick video to demonstrate how easy it is to use.

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

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.