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!

Before I go on and show you how this will work and what it will look like please note that this functionality has not yet been put live and a such the images shown below may look slightly different to the final version but with no significant changes to the basic functionality.

We will have two different variants of our button. One for on our TweetMeme website, which we call our internal button. And one for on external websites. I explain this first because I don’t want anyone getting confused that they act very slightly differently.

The TweetMeme Button on the TweetMeme site

The image above is what you will see when you try to connect to TweetMeme for the first time. It is basically setting you up to connect us to TweetMeme using Twitter’s Oauth access. It will take you to Twitter and ask you to log in just like in the image below. It’s a bit like Facebook connect really but for Twitter.

Once you’ve done this you’ll then be able to re-tweet any content from our site by pressing the green part of our TweetMeme button without having to log into TweetMeme if you are already logged into Twitter. Instead you’ll just get an image like the one below! Note that you can now edit the content of the message to whatever you choose. What you cannot do is remove or replace the URL with a different one. This is to ensure that the content sent does really relate back to the original source. After all we wouldn’t want it to misguide people.

Now for on your own site!

External TweetMeme Buttons!

To ensure consistency and simplicity we use a very similar system to the internal one. So for the first time you log into the TweetMeme button you will see the following:

Once again it connects with Twitter just like Facebook connect for the first time. If you aren’t logged into Twitter you’ll be asked to log in as usual and then get passed back to the button. Where you can edit the content (excluding the URL) and read even more interesting content on the site. We don’t take you away from the site that you are reading to update your users.

If at any point you don’t like or want this functionality you can always log into TweetMeme and change your preferences so that all buttons act as they currently do with no content editing for your account and automatic retweeting of content when you press then button and are logged in. If for any reason you say no the the initial connection on an external site we will automatically revert back to the original log in and allow manual tweeting & editing of your tweet on your own Twitter account on Twitter.

We hope you enjoy the new functionality and if you are press and would like to find out more about the button or require additional information please don’t hesitate to get in contact.

Today we are launching a shiny new TweetMeme competition. As many of you know, we recently released our new TweetMeme platform which included our comments system. Well just to get you all started using the system and to see how you find the comment system we thought we’d have a little fun in the form of our comments competition.  Here’s how it will work.

The Best Comment

What we are looking for is the best comment that you can create around one of the posts on our site.  The comment must be created on our system and re-tweeted through the site.  The individual with the highest number of re-tweets of a comment will win our competition.

How to enter STEP 1 – Login Login to TweetMeme (this requires a Twitter account – if you don’t have one? go here STEP 2 – Find Find a story that you find interesting – click on comments – or the ‘more’ button. STEP 3 – Comment Leave a comment and have it send it back to Twitter (this is the default behaviour) – get your friends to retweet your comment. STEP 4 – Spread the word Spread the word about the competition and about your comments on our site! Lets see how far and wide you can get your cool and interesting comments. This competition will be running for 7 days 1 month from today and we will do a daily update here on the blog on who our top 10 comment re-tweeters are! We will announce the winner and runners up on the 8th October around 5pm GMT. PS the most amusing comment that I see may also get a sneaky little prize too! And anyone I see just spamming will get removed! Spam is EVIL!

What could you win? First Place – An EEE PC Netbook, a TweetMeme Tshirt and stickers. Second Place – An IPod Touch 16gb , a TweetMeme Tshirt and stickers. Third Place – A Flip HD, a TweetMeme Tshirt and stickers. 5 Runners up will get a TweetMeme Tshirt and stickers.

Terms & Conditions for this competition can be found here.

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

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.

• bit.ly – (API support coming soon.)
• awe.sm – (API supported)
• cli.gs – (API support coming soon.)
• digg.com (API supported)
• is.gd
• TinyURL.com
• tr.im
• su.pr – (API supported)
• ow.ly – (API support coming soon.)
• lopurls.us
• twurl.nl

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

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.

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.

Core features

• tabs! open as many individual tabs with different search results in each
• Integration with the TweetMeme API to allow users to preview short url’s (including ability to one-click retweet if you are logged into tweetmeme)
• drag/drop each tab to change ordering
• one-click trending topics to open new ‘tabs’
• Retweet, View Profile, Reply to tweets (via the twitter web interface)
• Remembers your tabs between sessions
• Adaptive search poll rate (we make sure we don’t kill the twitter search even with lots of tabs open)

TweetTabs marks the start of a range of complimentary services that we will be launching over the coming months.