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.

Europe-Unlimited, Europe’s leading event organisers for investors and technology companies, today revealed its 2009 Tech Media Invest Top 100 list, in association with The Guardian, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Kemp Little. And there in our inbox was an announcement that we are one of the top 100 tech media companies for investors and others to keep an eye on! What can we say! There’s been a lot of hard work behind the scenes at TweetMeme to keep our product and related services fresh and fun. It’s great to hear that The Guardian like what we are doing and we will continue to improve and grow with time.

According the the Guardian we were chosen for our creativity, innovation as a great social media site.   There were only 10 in our category which is a real surprise to me!  I would have expected there to be more but that makes it all the more special to the TweetMeme team!

Thank you to those who were involved in putting the list together and we look forward to a bright future!

Earlier in the week we had a chat with Guy Kawasaki about integration of the TweetMeme content and button into AllTop and as a result TweetMeme is now on Alltop.com http://tweetmeme.alltop.com/.

As you may have already noticed Alltop is a great new way to read all our different feeds and in terms of our content it takes the top stories and aggregates them to give you a quick and simple view of what we have on our site.  Feel free to take a peak and let us and Guy know what you think.

Our thanks on this one to @guykawasaki and his team for getting it all sorted out it looks great and we look forward to seeing what happens next with it.

We are on the hunt for intersting, unusual or useful places where you are finding our re-tweet button.  This week has been no exception, interestingly we found that we are now on the Sky Blogs site of all places.  So if you happen to read any of the sky blogs like “The Weather Girls” for example then you can now re-tweet whatever they are talking about!

As you may have already heard we are also on Governor Schwarznegger’s newsroom pages where you can read about his suggestion of replacing textbooks with digital books.  Interestingly that particular story was re-tweeted via our button a number of times and the news of his announcement was debated over on our local radio station BBC Radio Berkshire.  Personally I’m not so sure that completely doing away with paper books is the answer but a combined mix of online text and traditional books is the best solution for me.  I wonder if the local radio station knew that he uses our button too?!  It’s funny how stories end up travelling around the world and mix with local news too.

I’ll be watching the Sky Blogs and looking out for their stories and news popping up on our local radio station or in other random places!  You never quite know where the next hot story will come from these days and Twitter has proven that time and time again.

We’re constantly looking out for sites that are using our button… anything from the most bizarre, obscure or most amusing use of our button on a site!  Where have you seen the button in use?  Where are you finding it most useful?  Are you finding any sites where you wish they had the button?  If so tell us!  We love to hear your stories about the button!

(Random Fact:) 600 million TweetMeme buttons were served last month and we are possibly one of the largest growing re-tweet sites out there at the moment. Last month we grew 120% and we are now starting to see our button pop up all over the place.

When we were over at The Next Web, Nick Halstead CEO of TweetMeme got cornered by the guys from Intruders.tv, they spent a nice time talking about Twitter, TweetMeme and communities.

Where to get the hottest stories on Twitter? Ask Nick Halstead of TweetMeme

If you liked this video and want to put other questions to Nick then leave them in the comments area and we’ll see what we can do about putting the questions to him and getting the questions and answers up here too!

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

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

Today we launched a shiny new feature called the TweetMeme Bar.  And I’m betting that you want to know what it does, how it does it and so on!  Well here’s the basic info… and when I manage to get Daniel in front of the video camera then I’ll also pop up a video of him going through all the cool ins and outs of the bar with you!  For now however you’ll have to cope with my geeky descriptions of it all!

As you can see from the image above (you’ll need to click on it to see it properly though) going from left to right… We have our logo, then the re-tweet button including the number of times the link has been retweeted the name of the link text and then the information view options of All, News, Images or Video’s.  Hit the re-tweet button and we’ll re-tweet the url that you are on.  Hit home and we take you back home to our site… or if you’re curious and just want to browse to any random re-tweet site then hit the shuffle button and off you go!

The Shuffle button opens up a bar above stories and allows you to ‘shuffle’ through stories that TweetMeme has found, this is gives you a unparalleled resource of interesting content. TweetMeme aggregates 200,000+ new links/stories/video/images every day and you have access to all of them. Just like the main site the bar lets you filter down by category and by the media type so you can discover things of interest to you.

We are very aware that some users do not like ‘framing’ of content and although the bar is ‘opt-out’ the first time you close the bar it prompts you immediately if you no longer wish to have the bar. It is also one click away on our settings pop-up to turn it on and off.

We think the logged in experience and tweetmeme bar make fantastic partners as you can shuffle through content and retweet what you like without leaving the page

We’re really excited about the TweetMeme bar and we do hope you like it.  We’re finding it really fun when browsing websites to find what sites have our re-tweet button on it.

Today we got a short but surprising e-mail.  It was from Gov. Schwarzenegger’s technical team, they were integrating our TweetMeme button into their website!  So we thought we’d nip over and see how they were getting on with it.  Lo and behold it was up and in the Newsroom area of the site for all their latest press releases!

We have to say we were pretty impressed at them integrating the button into the site, we’d had no direct contact with them until that e-mail and all of a sudden there it was right up there.  I wonder how they heard about it and who told them…  We do hope other companies start looking at this and see how it can benefit them getting their press releases and latest news onto the Twittersphere.

So if you are inspired by the use of our button on the California State and want it on your own site all you need to do is pop here and install it!