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.
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
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.
We never rest on our laurels here at TweetMeme HQ and have been beavering away on a range of improvements. I wanted to give you a sneak peak at a few new buttons launching next week.
Firstly one big change we have already made is to remove the (via @tweetmeme) from the end of any retweets. This will give a little more room at the end of tweets to be retweeted again.
Image Button
The current retweet button is a clever little thing – it can redirect you to Twitter to retweet but also if your logged into TweetMeme (via OAuth) it sends the tweet behind the scenes and leaves you on the site you were currently browsing, this we call ‘one-click retweeting’. The downside is that Javascript can only live in certain places on the web, i.e. in a web browser.
We think there are lots of other places you may want to get retweeted from so we have come up with ‘image buttons’. These look identical to the current retweet button (an example is on the right) with the same live-retweet count, the big difference is that it is rendered as a image which means you can put it anywhere that you can put a normal image. Here are some ideas we had for using it,
RSS Feeds – JavaScript does not work inside RSS (most RSS readers strip it out because of XSS security issues) so the button is perfect to allow your users to read your article and then retweet it.
Emails – You can embed it into an HTML email to promote any link you like.
Wordpress.com – Some sites like wordpress.com do not allow you to embed Javascript, but you can use this button instead.
Domain Count
We wanted a way that sites could show off how much they are getting retweeted beyond just the individual story retweet counts. So we came up with the ‘Weekly Retweet’ chicklet, it shows the weekly total number of retweets for your whole website. The counter re-calculates every 24 hours and the colour can be customized (examples on the right).
Analytics
Lastly we will be soon launching a much more detailed analytics package for website owners. You can already use TweetMeme to track the trend of a particular story (example here) and get the list of people who retweeted the story.
Websites can already track their weekly trends of retweets using TweetMeme (Example here) this is useful, but we wanted to give much more detail. The new package is aimed at fully understanding how your story spread and how you may adapt future story releases to take best advantage of Twitter and its amazing viral nature.
The results sticker competition of the sticker competition are in, and for such a short competition (less than 24 hours) we did get a lot of entries and some really great ideas, so thanks to those who spent time thinking these up and to those who obviously had nothing better to do at work that day (cough @amykate) we salute you all.
Results
We voted via a process of sticks, score cards, hand raising, Google docs spreadsheet (we are geeks remember!) each team member having between 1 and 5 points to assign to their top five favorite entries.
First Prize
Number: 404
Quote: Tweet Not Found
Submitted By: Sampicli (multiple people did submit this but Sampicli was first)
This was by far the clear winner, and being a very geeky reference I am sure will be very popular. For those non-geeks 404 refers to a missing webpage. The winner will receive 50 of the stickers.
Second Prize
Number: 69
Quote: Tweeting me, Tweeting you
Submitted By: holytshirt
Second place goes to the smutty minded, and if you don’t understand the reference I suggest you go ask mummy to explain the birds and the bees. The winner will receive 25 of the stickers.
Third Prize
Number: 1
Quote: to rule them all
Submitted By: Laura.2mdc
This is actually my personal favorite and I will be getting some t-shirts done up with this design as well. The reference refers to The Lord of the Rings and the One Ring that Sauran made for himself to have dominion over everyone else (very apt I thought). The winner will receive 10 of the stickers.
Honourable Mentions
There were so many others that got voted on but did not make it into the top 3 – so I have listed them below, if you want to see the full list of submissions check out the comments on the original blog post.
707 tweets – iz in ur button memeing ur tweet – by asmitter
2001 tweets – Just what do you think you’re doing, Dave? – by onemilliommonkeys
99999 tweets – And all I got was this tweetin’ t-shirt! – by mjwysocki1975
300 tweets – Tonight we tweet in hell – by onemilliommonkeys
Earlier today we launched a Sticker Competition to help us come up with ideas for stickers that represent our Retweet Button (example on the right).
The Prizes
A quick reminder of the prizes on offer for the best ideas.
First Prize – 50 stickers (with the relevant retweet count + text they suggested)
Second Prize – 25 stickers
Third Prize – 10 stickers
Poll
We have had some fantastic submissions already and I wanted to share some of the best (chosen by me) and allow you to vote on them, this is only for fun and the final decision will still be judged by the TweetMeme team.
To celebrate the continued spread of our Retweet Button we are having stickers made in the shape of the button. We think the button is now quite iconic but we wanted to have a bit of fun with them as well, we decided to come up with some phrases that go along with each ‘retweet’ count. So for instance 666 is ‘The Devil made me Tweet it’.
Competition
We thought it would be a lot more interesting if we ran a competition that allowed you all to suggest ideas. So the rules are thus,
Pick a number, between 1 and 99999
Come up with a quote that is funny, thought provoking, geeky, etc.
The quote does have to fit on the button, so the longer it is the smaller font that will have to be used. (which would upset @dtsn)
You have until 9am 3rd July (GMT) to submit your entry via the comments on this blog post
The Prizes
We will potentially use any of the ideas you come up with, but the top 3 ideas we will give a prize to.
First Prize – 50 stickers (with the relevant retweet count + text they suggested)
Second Prize – 25 stickers
Third Prize – 10 stickers
Judging
The TweetMeme team will be judging the entries, and will be looking for originality, humour, idioicy, geekyness, and deliberate obscureness. The judges decisions is final (blah blah). We will put up a blog post tomorrow announcing the winners and linking to their twitter profile (you dont have one? what?)
Lastly please share this post (via the retweet button! btw – the big button is not clickable )
UPDATE: We have put up a poll for some of the best suggestions so far.
UPDATE 2: Competition is now CLOSED – will post the results soon.
This Wednesday a really important conference takes part in London, Media 140 is one of the first in a
wave of twitter/micro-blogging related conferences. Twitter has shown massive growth and has quickly become a key source of real-time news for a lot of people.
Every major news agency has an account on twitter and many breaking news stories have been sourced from twitter. The reality of the changes in journalism is well documented including the current desperate attempts to find a new revenue stream. All these things will be under discussion at media140. I will be speaking at the event discussing the future of micro-blogging and it’s future in breaking news.
The event will bring together journalists, bloggers, social media advocates and publishers to share and discuss the effects and impact of twitter and other social media tools on mainstream media.
The conference is a complete sell-out so the only way to get involved is of course twitter! You can follow the offical @media140 account plus on the day the #media140 tag will be used. You can also see pictures of the event on the offical flickr account.
We have been rather busy with all the updates to tweetmeme and so had not got round to looking at the daily statistics we collect on which URL shorteners get used the most on twitter. I peeked at the data tonight and was surprised at what I found. Firstly BIT.LY has gained nearly 3% market share in the space of 3 weeks (last time we reported was 23rd March). Also IS.GD gained 1% and now taken up 3rd place, overall this means TINYURL.COM has lost over 3%.
TINYURL is really only holding this because twitter uses it as it’s core shortening service – but does not have the features of some of its rivals, how long twitter keeps it this way is matter up for much debate.
@Totally_Toni if you turn it back on and then click where you see the ? it will tell you the cause. :) 2009/11/20
@Totally_Toni I suspect that what you are experiencing is a conflict with 1 of your other plugins as its not currently showing on your site. 2009/11/20
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