We have just made available a new version of the TweetMeme Extension for Google Chrome. The extension is a way for you to take a little TweetMeme button all over the web with you to easily share any page you come across. It gives you at-a-glance realtime tweet counts for pages as you visit them in Chrome, and one-click tweeting of the page you’re on. It also benefits from TweetMeme’s enormous database of historic tweet counts stretching back many years.

In the new version, we’re pleased to announce the addition of automatic tweet translation. By default there is no translation of pages (your tweet will be in the language the page is written in), but you can now optionally force all tweets to be translated into a language of your choice from: English, French, Italian, German, Japanese, Spanish and Portuguese (that’s English, Français, Italiano, Deutsch, 日本, Español, Português). We use the TweetMeme API to do the translation, which is in turn powered by Google Translate.

You can download the new version of the extension straight away from the Chrome Extension site. If you have it installed already, the update will roll out to you in the next few hours, or if you’re impatient you can go to the site straight away and it will re-install the new version for you!

Open Source

I am also extremely pleased to announce that the source code behind the TweetMeme Chrome Extension is now open-sourced under the MIT license, and available for you to clone, fork and comment on at Github.

Open source code is an important component of building the latest web applications (you only have to look at the popularity of the Apache projects, open-source applications by various other social media companies, and many many other projects) and keeping the ecosystem active and developing, and we’re extremely happy to be contributing back to the community by adding this release to our existing open source projects.

WordPress 3.0 has just been released with lots of new features! Don’t worry both our plugins have been tested and will work with WordPress 3.0. For more information on the plugins check out the Extend pages of WordPress.

TweetMeme Button
TweetMeme Follow Button

We are happy to announce that we have added two new Windows Live Writer Plugins to our offering with the help and support of the Live Writer developer community.  Our thanks go out to Scott Lovegrove who has carefully and lovingly created the Windows Live Writer TweetMeme plugin for WordPress.com along with the Windows Live Writer Follow Button Plugin.  Whilst he was on a role and doing these new plugins he also updated the much loved Windows Live Writer TweetMeme plugin to include support for hashtags.

We hope you like the plugins and if you are a developer and want to do cool stuff with our API’s then please do take a peak at our developer documents!  Tell us about your great creations and we’ll give you the spotlight!

Further to the TweetMeme Blogger Gadget introduced last week, we are increasing our support for Blogger users with a new template editor.

We realise that the positioning of the Gadget in the Sidebar isn’t ideal, as many would prefer it inline with their posts, so to overcome this you can use our new tool to insert the button directly into your blog template. The editor is also good news for bloggers using “Classic” templates to whom gadgets aren’t available.

To get your template code for editing, simply go to Layout then Edit HTML in your dashboard, and copy your complete template from within the textarea ([Ctrl+A] then [Ctrl+C] works well). If you are using advanced templates, please ensure the Expand Widget Templates box is ticked, though our editor will tell you if you forgot!

Once you’ve found and copied your template code you can start using the TweetMeme Blogger Template Editor.

With the addition of the editor, we’ve decided to bundle Blogger support in to a new Blogger menu page from which you can find the Gadget, the Template Editor, and a guide for manual editing.

Two in one day?  Monsieur, with these plugins you are really spoiling us!

Hot on the heels of the TypePad Widget we now bring you a Blogger Gadget.  This is a simple way to add the TweetMeme retweet button to your blog and place the button where you want it on your blog page without the need for editing your templates, all using the native Page Elements interface.

To get started just make your way over to the How to add the TweetMeme Gadget to Blogger page and follow the steps.

Ever wished it was a little simpler to add our retweet button to your blog?  Well in continuing our steps to making your lives easier we’re pleased to announce the TweetMeme TypePad Widget!  There is now a new page in the plugins section of the site which has all the great options to customise your button and how it retweets, and even has a live preview so you can see how it will all look before it’s added to your TypePad blog.

Unfortunately TypePad’s API only allows widgets to be added to those blogs using Drag-and-Drop Design Templates so if you are using Advanced Templates you will, for the moment at least, need to continue using the manual insert method described in our help page How to Add a TweetMeme Button to your TypePad Blog.

Head over to the TweetMeme TypePad Widget page to customise your button and get it added to your blog!
By default, the widget will be installed at the bottom of your side-bar but you are free to re-organise if you wish through the Organize Content section of your Design tab.

Support for many more sites is on the way.

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.

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.

We are currently looking to put a case forward to WordPress.com to get our TweetMeme button plugin into WordPress.com as part of this effort we need to gather statistics on how many people are asking for our button to be integrated into WordPress.com.  So rather than just sitting back and waiting for the requests to come in we thought the easiest way to do this was to ask everyone who is interested in having our Re-Tweet button on their wordpress.com hosted blogs to re-tweet this article.  This way we can count the number of requests for the feature we are getting.  We’re going to class each re-tweet as a request for integration!  If you want this feature added in but don’t yet have a twitter account then do leave us a comment to let us know you want us to count you in!

By re-tweeting all your followers and friends on Twitter will also hear about this and hopefully those followers of yours who use wordpress.com will re-tweet the article and therefore help with the request count.  If you also want to blog about it then that’s fine with us too!  The wider the spread the more feedback we should have and hopefully the higher the likelihood that we get the information that is needed for wordpress.com.

We look forward to hearing from everyone!

Today we got a really great e-mail into our inbox!  Lee Turner who is part of the B2Evolution community has created a B2Evolution Plugin that does the equivalent to our wordpress plugin but for the B2Evolution blog engine.  This means that those users who have been asking about how to integrate our button with B2Evolution can now have a nice simple way to do so.  You’ll find all the information on how to install and use this plugin over on Lee’s TweetMeme plugin page.

Please direct any feedback of bug reports that you have back to Lee.  This still leaves us with TypePad and better Blogger integration to go.  We’re also looking into getting our plugin into WordPress.com but we will be needing the help of the community for that one as we need to know how many of our users are wanting to install it into their WordPress.com sites!  We’ll come back soon with a post for you to register your interest in the WordPress.com integration!