Tag Archives: api
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:
Or just search on TweetMeme
So today is my first day as the community manager at TweetMeme and as such I thought it would be a good opportunity to introduce myself and what I’ll be doing here over the next few months. So here goes…
First things first I’ll be looking over the comments from our current users and identifying any key areas where the site could be drastically improved so get your suggestions into us via the forum as I’ll be looking there to see what areas are your pain points and what features we are missing that should really be there. I’m also into making things as simple and usable as possible so if I see usability issues I’ll be picking up on them to make your job easier!
Secondly I’ll be attending The Next Web conference and will have my laptop with me so that you can see TweetMeme in action and at it’s best. 
As such do come and find me and I’ll show you what we can do with the site! Honestly there’s more to it than just the front page… I wonder how many of you are using the tweetmeme wordpress plugin on your sites or the buttons. Also if you’re a developer and are interested in working with our API then do take a look at it, we are looking for feedback on this as it’s something we are hoping for developers to get really into!
And finally some random facts about me…
Background: Formerly I worked at Cardinal Health as a software engineer doing a lot of .net programming and software development in and around this area. I’m also the founder of the Girl Geek Dinners and that is where my community experience comes from. I’m known for being a little unconventional in my approach to things and have a passion for mobile devices… so thanks to Nick (aka the Boss) I am now fully connected with an IPhone! So that means you can find me on Twitter a little more often than you used to! If you want to find me on twitter my account is @girlygeekdom and I have a couple of blogs… my group blog is GirlyGeekdom and my personal one which I’ve not put much on recently is Flirting with the Future… I thought it was a fun name for a blog! You’ll also find me blogging here and over on the Fav.or.it blog too! And yes I will be cross posting every now and again, but hopefully not too often!
The twitter firehose is a LOT of data, TweetMeme spends it’s life sifting through finding all the URL’s resolving millions of shortened URL’s (e.g. http://bit.ly, http://tinyurl.com) in the process. Once resolved we go grab the title of the story, and also do a lot of clever stuff to get images/videos + the body of text (i.e. the description of the story).
We thought it would be useful to expose this data via a set of API calls which developers could use to improve their twitter applications who do not wish the massive burden of processing all the data that TweetMeme does.
From Today we launch 3 simple methods that expose a small part of our dataset, these will hopefully be followed by more that allows data-mining around the unique resolved-stories dataset we have.
If you want to dive straight into the technical description please go visit our API page
The three calls we have exposed so far are,
- url_info – This allows developers to take any URL posted to twitter and get back the title, category, tweet count, date posted and the resolved URL.
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- recent – Grabs the most recent stories from Tweetmeme
- popular – Grabs the most popular stories from Tweetmeme
If you wish to get updates on further developers follow tweetmemedev
