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.
I was testing the new site tonight and thought I would share a quick (5 min) video of using the comments. Look forward to getting your feedback and also putting this baby live! (click in bottom-right corner of video to get the high-res version.)
I wanted to share a few numbers about the growth of TweetMeme and explain why so many users are using our service. In the last 30 days we have served 1.6 billion retweet buttons, and we seeing an average growth of 20% week-on-week. The list of sites who trust our brand and our scalability read like the who’s who of the blog world The Huffingtonpost, Techcrunch, Mashable and perezhilton to name but a few.
Trusted Brand
We believe that our focus on innovation (with the help of our active community) and the continued reliability of our service is important in building a trusted brand. Below is list of the key features that differentiate us.
One-Click retweeting
RSS + Email Buttons
A range of plugins both by us and 3rd party developers.
We know that publishers/blogs use our button to get further traction, but that is only one side of the coin. How do you know if your story was a success beyond just the retweet count? We have been working with partners to build a analytics package that is tailored for our users to understand how’s and why’s of the spread of a story. We will be starting a private beta next week (at same time as the Public release of the new version of TweetMeme), for now I have included a few sample screenshots.
Many people have said that the comments left on blogs are often better than the blog post itself, so when we started looking at commenting on TweetMeme our primary goal was to allow good quality comments to be retweeted.
So today we are giving a sneak peek into one aspect of the new TweetMeme release which is coming early next week that fulfills that vision and a whole lot more.
Commenting
click screenshot to enlarge
We thought long and hard on how we could introduce comments to TweetMeme that would meet a number of goals including our retweet functionality.
Reply mechanism that feels familiar to Twitter users
Ability to embed media into comments
Retweeting
I am sure everyone has found that discussions on blogs ‘can’ be absolutely compelling and that it is not unusual to find single comments that run to numbers of pages and would in themselves often warrant being their own blog post. These often go overlooked by a large proportion of readership that doesn’t have the time to read through all the comments on a single story.
Just like our normal story retweet functionality each Twitter user can only retweet a comment once (i.e. one vote per user). Within TweetMeme this means a simple one-click retweet which we send on your behalf behind the scenes, for users on Twitter they can retweet the unique link that points at that comment and we will count any further retweets towards the total. This gives an individual comment the same chance of spreading virally as any normal story.
Finally we make it possible to switch from the default ordered by date, to a ordered by ‘retweets’ so for a particular story see the most popular comments. On a story with hundreds of comments we think just like TweetMeme the ability to filter by the retweet popularity will be valuable in finding the quality comments.
Replying
We love the simplicity of Twitter and especially the ability to reply to multiple people. We wanted to duplicate this within TweetMeme but also make it quicker + simpler for new users. So all you have to do is click on the ‘reply’ button and the name of the person gets put in a ‘TO:’ box, click on another reply (on a different comment) and that name will also be added.
And just like Twitter you can click on ‘Replies’ (Twitter now calls it ‘mentions’) and you will only see the comments that have been directed back at you. On top of this when you post a comment on TweetMeme it also sends a Tweet to Twitter which includes the @[name] of each Twitter user, so even if they are not on TweetMeme at the time to see that you have replied, they will see it on back on Twitter (or any clients such as TweetDeck.)
Media Simplicity
We love short URL’s for their tracking and ability to be easily spread about the social web. For the average user they can also hide the final content and result in them not getting clicked. When we sat down and thought how we could encourage the embedding of media and the use of short URL’s the solution was simple, just use inherent ability of TweetMeme to un-shorten and aggregate the content at the end of the link.
You can see from the example above that the comment includes three links which have been annotated and reference the list of media below the content. When I wrote the comment I actually copy + pasted three short URL’s but TweetMeme went and un-shortened them. Then went and found the content associated with the links, e.g. title, body of the post and any media attached.
And Finally
This is only part of a major overhaul to TweetMeme that includes our 3rd generation of news filtering, new and much improved spam detection, improvements in search and a whole host of other smaller changes. We thank everyone who continues to support us and uses our Retweet Button. You can be sure we will continue to innovate in this space.
You know you are doing something right when people start copying you! It is said that copying is the sincerest form of flattery, so when I did my daily read of the tech blogs this morning I was of course interested to read on Techcrunch that retweet.com will soon be entering the fray and that it looked suspiciously like TweetMeme.
I had actually been contacted by their COO Tyson Quick in April to ask if we would support their plan to get twitter to support retweeting natively on Twitter. At the time I responded that I would think about it, in fact what I thought was that they were obviously trying to get us to help them promote a service that would at a later stage turn into a competitor, so I ignored it.
What caught my attention was that some industrious individual (@travisketchum) had left a comment on the TechCrunch article that he had been doing some digging around on the website and had found a link to their development environment. What we found ourselves was that our retweet button Javascript and the Wordpress plugin code seemed to have been directly copied from ours.
We are happy for others to learn from our endeavors and flattered by the copying but some of our more complex JavaScript was obfuscated to deter others from attempting to re-use our code. We take a dim view of trying to pass off our code especially when it is attempting to create a competitor.
We our seeking further legal advice and will be pursuing every avenue to protect the hard work of our team.
It was decided today that we don’t tell you enough about what goes on behind the scenes at TweetMeme; in other words, what we do in the office when we aren’t busy keeping you updated with the latest Twitter news and making sure the site works well!
So, here is a quick rundown of the past couple of days…
The first thing to mention is that @nicktelford celebrated his birthday this week! He was brought some pink balloons and some lovely presents which all related to his favourite celebrity — Miley Cyrus. Needless to say he was ecstatic when he opened them! To make his day even better we then played his new Miley Cyrus CD… unfortunately that was short lived due to “noise” complaints from other companies in the building. Clearly they didn’t appreciate Miley as much as we did!
In other news… when I started working for TweetMeme almost 3 weeks ago I was a girl with a slight Facebook obsession. Unfortunately, working for a company which runs a Twitter app, this was not acceptable for certain members of the TweetMeme team (*cough* @dtsn and @chris_alexander). So 6 days ago they started the process of “converting” me over to Twitter. While I hate to admit it, they were successful, and I now have two programmes on my computer which will keep me updated with Twitter, as well as my Twitter homepage permenantly being open on my browser. This caused everyone at TweetMeme to use Twitter as the “water cooler”… rather than turning around to talk to one another, we now just converse via Twitter instead… (talking is so overrated!!)
Finally, the TweetMeme Nazbatag Bunny needs a special mention. She is currently taking a holiday to the other end of the office, so has been keeping me entertained and Chris annoyed for the past week… it has been very fun making her send Twitter updates of the wrong time! Today Chris did something very foolish and created a programme which allows us to send messages that Bunny will read out (something tells me he immediately regretted it!). If you want to see what Bunny is saying to all of us, feel free to follow her via Twitter.
I am releasing a couple of new channels today; the first one to be launched is the NASA channel. The channel is quickly filling with interesting content, and I am sure this will be a popular channel for people who are interested in space and science. Follow the NASA channel here!
The second new channel is the Facebook channel, which I am sure will be popular with fans of social media — I know this is a channel which I’m interested in, and I am sure others at Tweetmeme will be too given the discussions in the office the past week! If you want to find out more about what is happening in the social media world, then you will want to check this channel out! Click here to follow the Facebook channel!
Following the announcement of Microsoft Office 2010 a few weeks ago, I decided it was time to create a channel dedicated to it, as the river was flooding with the latest stories. This channel also contains the latest stories about Microsoft 7, I am sure this will be a popular channel amongst the computer techies out there! Click here to follow the latest stories on the Microsoft Office 2010 channel!
The final channel going live today is the Recession and Economy channel. As this is an issue which is going to be affecting everyone in the forseeable future, I expect this will be a popular channel. Follow the Recession and Economy channel to keep up-to-date with the latest stories!
There are a couple of new channels today; the first is a Harry Potter channel, which I was personally very excited about creating! Following the release of the latest movie in the series (The Half-Blood Prince) last week, the river has been filling up with stories about the famous fictional wizard.
To follow the latest reviews of the film, and news about the characters and the final two films, check out the Harry potter channel
With the Ashes 2009 well under way, the second new channel for today is dedicated to the famous cricketing event. I am sure this new channel will be popular with our users who are also sporting fans.
To keep up to date with the 2009 Ashes, take a look at the Ashes 2009 channel
The final new channel I am releasing today is the Climate Change channel. As this is a popular topic currently over the news it seemed an appropriate channel to launch.
To find out the latest developments about Climate Change, and see what you can do to help, visit the Climate Change channel.
@Totally_Toni if you turn it back on and then click where you see the ? it will tell you the cause. :) 2009/11/20
@Totally_Toni I suspect that what you are experiencing is a conflict with 1 of your other plugins as its not currently showing on your site. 2009/11/20
I am releasing a couple of new channels today; the first one to be launched is the NASA channel. The channel is quickly filling with interesting content, and I am sure this will be a popular channel for people who are interested in space and science. Follow the 
The second new channel is the Facebook channel, which I am sure will be popular with fans of social media — I know this is a channel which I’m interested in, and I am sure others at Tweetmeme will be too given the discussions in the office the past week! If you want to find out more about what is happening in the social media world, then you will want to check this channel out! Click here to follow the 
Following the announcement of Microsoft Office 2010 a few weeks ago, I decided it was time to create a channel dedicated to it, as the river was flooding with the latest stories. This channel also contains the latest stories about Microsoft 7, I am sure this will be a popular channel amongst the computer techies out there! Click here to follow the latest stories on the 
The final channel going live today is the Recession and Economy channel. As this is an issue which is going to be affecting everyone in the forseeable future, I expect this will be a popular channel. Follow the 
There are a couple of new channels today; the first is a Harry Potter channel, which I was personally very excited about creating! Following the release of the latest movie in the series (The Half-Blood Prince) last week, the river has been filling up with stories about the famous fictional wizard.
The final new channel I am releasing today is the Climate Change channel. As this is a popular topic currently over the news it seemed an appropriate channel to launch.
