Tweetmeme Lives!

Yes! As Louis Gray has just revealed tweetmeme is back up and running again. We are now taking advantage of the summize purchase and the abilities it brings to twitter. We may drop back to the XMPP once it is reliable as do gain a lot of extra information beyond just the links that we are looking for.

During the outage we did do a lot of other development on tweetmeme which we have not yet put live, the reason? Well the codebase got pretty messy with all the swapping of interfaces and so we now need to merge back in the changes. So what else have we done?

Images / Videos

We do get a lot of links that point at blog posts or directly at images + videos, and we thought it would make the interface a lot nicer if we could mix in some images, so we took some code from fav.or.it and started grabbing thumbnails of images from the links we found.

Better Ranking

Although ranking based upon the number of URL’s is interesting we wanted to take the concept a little further, so took the reddit model and introduced a ‘kudos’ factor for each twitter user, their ‘kudos’ increases for every story they are the first to post (and that then subsequently gets elevated onto the top stories). The kudos is then used to rank stories themselves, so a user with a higher kudos has more chance of getting a story promoted.

Spam

Tweetmeme does currently leave itself very open to Spam (damn those evil spamlords) - there are a number of services out there trying to tackle this problem (twitter seems to be ignoring it) and we have a few tricks that we are going to try and get the majority of it.

Lastly we will also be investigating the aggregation of other micro-blogging services, plurk and identi.ca are prime candidates so that as people migrate between services the overall number of URL’s + tweets continues to grow.

We will make an announcement as soon as we have merged all the code back together and push out a new release. For now please give us your feedback on what else you would like to see from tweetmeme.

Tweetmeme Down Due to Twitter Jabber Problems

 The following was posted on the twitter development talk forum by Alex Payne.

Due to abusive behavior we’ve been forced to temporarily disable our
Jabber/XMPP services.  PubSub subscriptions, tweet deliver, updating,
tracking, and all other Jabber features will be unavailable until
further notice.  We’ll attempt to resolve this as soon as possible.
Apologies for the inconvenience.

Tweetmeme relies upon this Jabber/XMPP feed so the site will not start working again until Twitter re-enables the feed.

The source of the problem? The spammers, we have seen a massive increase in the scammers/spammers trying to abuse twitter and it would not surprise me if they had found new and interesting ways to use the jabber interface to do naughty things.

We hope twitter will sort this out soon as we have a load of new features we were working on for tweetmeme, so watch this space.

For updates on what we are doing in the future on tweetmeme/fav.or.it follow me on twitter

UPDATE: Twitter have posted a blog post about it. They now hope to have everything back up and running by sometime Saturday (US time)

Tweetmeme Launch

I am pleased to announce the launch of a new service tweetmeme. I have started using twitter a lot more recently to find out what is ‘going on’ and many people who I had discussed twitter with were saying the same thing. What I believed was missing was a way to spot content that is posted on twitter and work out what is popular.

Thus tweetmeme was born, put simply it watches what is going on within twitter and picks up anyone posting links to content. We then track how many other mentions of the same content are made (and how influential they are.) and present them in a simple format.

And because the content that is posted on twitter is of a very wide content we also broadly categorize it, these are broken down into blogs / video / images / audio.

Archive

Every five minutes the system takes a snapshot of the current content and produces the web pages you view, this allows us also to build up an archive of how it looked over time, the site lets you access any of the previous pages via a simple set of drop-down boxes.

Feeds

It is also possible to subscribe to a RSS feed for either the frontpage or any of the individual categories, each of the feeds contains a list of items as they are added onto tweetmeme.

Notification

Whenever a new piece of content is added into tweetmeme we automatically notify the user who first mentioned it back through twitter, this appears from the ‘tweetmeme’ twitter user. This is meant as another way to follow the content being found by twitter but also as a reward to the user so they get notified that they were the first to spot it.

River

Along with the feeds you can also access a ‘river’ view of the content as it was added.

Thanks

This project has only possible because of help from a number of very talented people. So let me first thank Marjolein Hoekstra who first twittered about the concept and since then has been a constant sounding board for the project. And because we are maxed out internally Stuart Dallas has been of massive assistance, Stuart has previously assisted on fav.or.it and we greatly appreciate all his efforts.

And lastly a big thanks to XCalibre who are supplying the hosting on FlexiScale which is a computing on demand platform (like Amazon EC2) which should help us cope with any major peaks in traffic.

UPDATE: I have been very quickly reminded how much influence has come from Techmeme when building this project, Gabe my apologies for not making mention before, fancy sharing links between the two services?

Nick Halstead (favorit Ltd)