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.

• 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 88x26px 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.

Today we launched http://TweetTabs.com, a new web-based twitter search + trends client. It is a simple, ultra fast and ultra leightweight interface to search and trends for Twitter. It also incorporates integration with TweetMeme to show previews of stories so you can be sure on what you are viewing. TweetTabs was born from ‘20% project’ created by our designer/JavaScript Samurai @dtsn (twitter.com/dtsn)

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.

Today we updated the TweetMeme site with some new features and some UI changes.  We are hoping that this will help you find your way around the site easier and quicker as well as find additional information on re-tweets around your stories.

So first of all we added the Follow on Twitter link.  This gives users the ability to follow a specific channel or the top level TweetMeme accoount.  You’ll find the Follow next to our Subscribe button and under the Sign in area on the top right of the page.

Secondly we’ve made it easier to find our channels on TweetMeme.  So now you can find our channels in our sub menu next to the Live button, as well as down the right hand side of our site showing the top channels on TweetMeme.

We have a variety of different channels that may be of interest to our readers including the recently added World Wide Developer Conference Channel and the Le Mans racing channel amongst others.

And finally we’ve done an update on our TweetMeme button.  The basics of the button remain the same, it still does the re-tweets via the re-tweet section of the button, but now we’ve also linked the top part of the button to the story page on TweetMeme relating to that story.  This means that people can see the most recent re-tweets from people and the trending graph of re-tweets for that story.

We hope you like the updates and if you find any bugs or have any suggestions relating to these new features then please let us know over on our forum.

Today we launched an update to our TweetMeme Widget. We have a number of new features that are integrated into the new widget. These include the ability to filter content in the widget by category, channel and domain.  This is giving you the user far more control over the information that you show in your widget.

For those of you who have had or are currently considering purchasing one of our custom channels this means that you can now use the widget in your own site to show the content of your own channel.

Also for those of you who have larger websites along the lines of Mashable and Techcrunch, you should find that you can track the top stories on your own domain through the widget too (this is a very new feature and as such please treat it as a beta feature). See the example widget below for the Formula 1 custom channel.  Also take a look at the widget page and see how much more useful it is now than it was.

If you have feedback or suggestions on the widget then please pop here and let us know what you think.

Interested in having a custom channel built for your brand or company then get in touch and we’ll be happy to discuss this further with you.

We are very happy today to be releasing our Twitter real-time deep link search. (quick link: http://search.tweetmeme.com ) We have been quietly building up an infrastructure that could leverage all the work we have previously done on aggregating all the links from Twitter and deep delving those links to find content and media.

We launch today with the ability to search 15+ million links which we have deep searched for content, this not only includes the text from web pages and blog posts but also videos and images.

Although the ability to keep our index totally real-time is great we also believe that the delivery of relevance is still just as important, our default search results are based upon a clever combination of newness, retweets and some other weighting factors. This means results tend to be recent and relevant but at the same time the most popular. We do also offer search by ‘Age’. Lastly you can sort the results purely by ‘retweets’ to give you the most relevant results based upon its popularity on Twitter.

Here is a quick bullet point of the key features of our search,

• Real-time search – our indexer picks up stories as they come out of Twitter
  • Boolean operators (& | – ! and grouping) – explained below
  • Sort by Best Match
  • Sort by Age
  • Sort by Retweet Count
• Filtering
  • Filter by Category
  • Filter by Media (News, Images, Videos)
  • Filter by Age (recent links first)
  • Filter by Tweets (e.g. 100+ retweets)
  • Filter by Channel (e.g. apple, start-ups)
• RSS – you can subscribe to any of the search results
• Retweet – you can retweet the links you find without leaving the site (if you are logged in via OAuth)

Some guidelines on how to use our search -> http://help.tweetmeme.com/2009/05/11/search-guidelines/

Lastly we will soon expose the engine via our API so that other developers can leverage the results.

See what the press have said already:

• TechCrunch: Tweetmeme Launches The Second Real-Time Tweet Link Search — This Hour
• VentureBeat: TweetMeme’s latest Twitter search tools take on Scoopler, OneRiot
• Mashable: Tweetmeme Shows Off the Future of Twitter Search
• Louis Gray: http://www.louisgray.com/live/2009/05/tweetmeme-launches-real-time-search.html
• CNN:  http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/05/12/future.search.engine/index.html?iref=t2test_techtues

Or just search on TweetMeme

Prior to today we had a restriction on the TweetMeme Button that all tweets were re-tweeted as RT @tweetmeme with the exception of those on the whitelist where they could do RT @their_twitter_account which allowed the re-tweet to be from a specific twitter account/ user.  We got lots of feedback from our users… especially those who weren’t on the whitelist via our Forums and listened to their shouts!  I bet they thought we were ignoring them! (but no, we were working away to ensure that the updates worked perfectly.)

So now everyone is whitelisted and you can change it to RT @[your twitter name]. We have updated the instructions on the Button page and we have also updated the WordPress Plugin so that you change the twitter account easily. Once you have the plugin installed, go to Settings, TweetMeme and then set the Source to your twitter name. (e.g. talktweetmeme in my case) Don’t include the @ otherwise it’ll be @@talktweetmeme which wouldn’t really work.

We hope you like the update and the power it gives you as a user to see who is re-tweeting your stories and articles.  It should also mean that you could create conversation around the stories online if you add those re-tweeting your stories as friends on twitter.  I’m sure people will come up with all sorts of useful ways of using this new and very much requested feature!

Please do give us feedback and new feature requests on our Forum.  We do read every request and we try to do those that are of value to many people as soon as we can!

You may have noticed a shiny new button on the top right corner of TweetMeme saying Sign in with Twitter on it.  This is our shiny new user login page.

When you are logged in via Twitter OAuth you can retweet items without having to be redirected to twitter, you click the ‘retweet’ and we send the tweet for you in the background. This lets you more easily browse content without having to open multiple windows. More importantly any ‘tweetmeme buttons’ you see on external sites now can be clicked and retweeted again without being redirected to twitter.When you click on a re-tweet button we will automate those re-tweets for you which means you can concentrate on the content and we will concentrate on your re-tweets.

Enjoy the new features that you find here and if you have any problems then let us know on the forum or Tweet @tweetmemedev or @talktweetmeme