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.
We are pleased to announce that today all comments left on TweetMeme will get shortened with the URL http://rep.ly – this will be exclusively used for comments so your followers when seeing a comment will always know you have just left a comment on TweetMeme.
Secondly we have made the integration with Twitter even better now allowing you to seamlessly reply to any Tweet on twitter that was associated with a particular story. This means you can quickly start a conversation with those who are already interested in that story.
Features
Each comment can be retweeted (either within TweetMeme or back on Twitter by retweeting the rep.ly link)
rep.ly exclusively used for comments
You can reply to more than one twitter user
Can reply to tweets + comments at the same time
Can embed video, images + stories
Thread view for individual comments
Live-updates
You can join the discussion on the new features here
Did you know that when you are logged into TweetMeme (via Twitter OAuth) that the retweet button becomes even simpler to use, No? Well I have recorded a very quick video that explains the difference between logged-in and logged-out
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!
Amongst the many new features we launched as part of V2 was the new bookmarklet – this is a really simple button that you drag into your bookmark toolbar on your browser – and when you are on any blog, video, image – in fact any website you can press the TweetMeme button and it will take you to the story page for that site back onto TweetMeme, that then gives you a quick and easy way to RETWEET or comment.
I have included the Bookmarklet below – just click and drag it onto your bookmark toolbar.
Today we launch TweetMeme V2 – we are calling it version ‘V2’ as today’s release really is a complete revamp of the site that encompasses a total rewrite of our scoring system, filtering engine and a whole raft of user interface enhancements and tweaks. It also incorporates the new commenting system which we previewed last week.
We look forward to getting all your feedback on this new version, please leave comments on this comment thread.
Ranking Content
The new site will have more varied and better quality content, this is achieved through better scoring of stories including a new ‘kudos’ score for individual Twitter users, plus we have a new ‘reporting’ mechanism allowing our users to flag content as abusive, spam or ‘This Sucks!’
Filtering
click to enlarge
The filtering engine is now at Version 3 codenamed ‘Pickle’ – this is our most advanced system yet allowing the real-time filtering of 10’s of millions of stories per day based upon our own programming language ‘Pickle Code’.
This release is future proof for scalability and also allows us to plug in new data sets as they become available. Included on the right is a screenshot of our tool that allows us to drag and drop rules that produces ‘Pickle Code’ – In the coming weeks we will do a feature on the architecture of this new system.
Commenting
The new commenting system also goes live, this includes the ability to retweet individual comments (when they are good!) replying to multiple users, live updates and a really tight integration into Twitter. For a full description of the commenting features previewed“>go here.
TweetMeme is also working with the team at JS-Kit to import the comments into the Echo Stream. TweetMeme will also be recommending and distributing Echo as the preferred solution to track the distributed conversation on blogs.
From Khris Lous CEO of JS-Kit
Echo is commited to re-assembling the distributed conversation back to blogs and other sites – working with TweetMeme is a natural step along that path
10:32:40 AM: Today we will be doing a maintenance update of our TweetMeme site #TweetMemeV2 as we know you like to know what’s going on we’re tweeting it
10:36:55 AM: Looks like we’re all set to get started!
10:39:08 AM: TweetMeme is now down and the buttons will be up for now still.
10:39:44 AM: And the buttons that are new will show the Maintenance button #TweetMemeV2
10:40:01 AM: System back up done! #TweetMemeV2
10:44:27 AM: Now for the big stuff! #TweetMemeV2
10:51:46 AM: Why is it that the post arrives mid upgrade and live tweet! It seems to all be going very smoothly so far… Fingers Crossed #TweetMemeV2 10:55:52 AM: Now for the code updates… they look like they are upgrading OK atm… The dev team are checking they are all there! #TweetMemeV2
11:01:59 AM: So what does everyone think of the new logo ? You’ll see we’ve updated it over on the TweetMeme twitter account http://retwt.me/pN 11:04:31 AM: TweetMeme will be back soon! http://bit.ly/ClXQy
via @tweetmeme
11:04:43 AM: TweetMeme Maintenance Live Update http://bit.ly/wnNjX
via @tweetmeme
11:07:17 AM: Do we want more pics of the team working hard? #TweetMemeV2
11:12:42 AM: So you’ve already seen Alex doing his thing… Now for Nick T our in house Mylie Cyrus fan… #TweetMemeV2 http://twitpic.com/fjwqd
11:16:04 AM: I have a feeling @nicktelford is probably going to hide now he’s been outed! http://is.gd/2DJ99
11:19:53 AM: If you’re wondering what’s going on we’re still upgrading. It does take a while to do though! The team have been working hard! #TweetMemeV2
11:24:12 AM: You should hear the silence in the office as everyone is beavering away! Just the tap tapping of keyboards! #TweetmemeV2
11:39:37 AM: Checking our spam filter settings & a few other bits now…#TweetmemeV2
11:50:40 AM: We’re now testing everything to make sure it’s all working properly!
12:01:44 PM: We can hear the dull tones of #readingfestival from our offices! I’m amazed we can hear it as it’s a few miles away! #TweetMemeV2
12:08:03 PM: Team motivation to get the site back up online #TweetMemeV2 http://twitpic.com/fjzzn
12:11:04 PM: RT @alexforrow: @talkTweetMeme http://twitpic.com/fjv3c – Yeah makes me look like some kind of milk addict <- he’s our milk fiend!
12:11:53 PM: RT @stewarttownsend: http://bit.ly/u9SNK The Story of Tweetmeme #tweetmemev2
12:33:54 PM: We have content in our test area! And are looking to go live very, very soon!
12:50:15 PM: The first thing to go online will be our API. THe rest will follow.
1:27:05 PM: The buttons should be starting to come back up and the API should be working but is currently rate limited.
5:49:09 PM: Not quite as simple an update as we hoped but buttons are being served & the API is running. The site update is a bit tricker but is coming
7:39:42 PM: And finally the main site is about to go live! Wait for it! …..
7:47:37 PM: Thanks to all the TweetMeme team for all their hard work today! I know it’s been a long hard few weeks getting it all finished! 7:54:41 PM: We hope everyone likes it and do let us know about any site bugs over on the forum http://help.tweetmeme.com/forum
TweetMeme is currently unavailable as we are performing a system upgrade.
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.
We have just updated our latest pet project Retwt.me with the most-requested feature of the past few days – a bookmarklet!
You can now shorten using Retwt.me from wherever on the web you happen to be. Just follow the instructions on the Bookmarklet page and you’ll be on your way in seconds.
We’ve also made a small change to the Analyse page – you can now put just an Alias (e.g. the “1″ in http://retwt.me/1) to quickly get Stats for a short URL.
We are soon launching a new TweetMeme but first we have a new member of the family, retwt.me.
KISS
We like to apply the KISS principle to everything we do, and retwt.me is KISS at its best, three simple functions.
1. Shorten – Give us a link and in fraction of a second we will have shortened it
2. Share – We give you simple tools to share the link out to your favorite sites
3. Analyse – A simple service means easy, simple to understand analytics
Future
We have no plans to extend the service beyond these very simple principles, it will be used initially within TweetMeme to shorten comment links and added into the ‘pool’ of available shorteners.
#TweetMemeV2
