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.
- Integrated support for 11 Shortening services
- Scale supported by Sun Microsystems
- 24 hour support from our Team on Twitter on our dedicated support forum
- Enterprise Features for larger sites
Future
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.
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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
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We thought long and hard on how we could introduce comments to TweetMeme that would meet a number of goals including our retweet functionality.
- Promotion of quality comments
- Works seamlessly with Twitter
- 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.
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.
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.
The new retweet chicklet is now live! what is it? It shows the total number of retweets that a particular website gets in the course of a single week. It comes in the standard 88×26px size and you can customize the colour of the chicklet to suite your website design.
We think this is a great simple addition to our other widgets and buttons and hope people will proudly display their retweet count for all to see.
How
We have made it dead simple for you to embed, just go to this page and type in the domain of your website, click on the RGB color value to pick a different colour, hit the ‘generate button’ and when your happy with the results cut and paste the HTML onto your own website.
Show Us
When you have added the chicklet please drop a comment back on this post so we can highlight some of the best sites in a future blogpost
Although my golfing knowledge is limited, many of our Tweetmeme users do share an interest in Golf. With the beginning of the 2009 British Open today, I decided ths was a great opportunity to set up a new channel, especially as the river is going to be full of the latest golf stories from the British Open!
Follow this channel to keep up to date with the latest from the British Open.
Today I launched a new channel which is bound to be a popular channel with our Tweetmeme users, as it will give you all the top stories about wine!
The channel will give you information about wines, provide updates about upcoming wine events, and inform you about the health advantages (and risks) about drinking wine. Keep up to date with this exciting new channel here: Wine Channel
