We are happy to announce that we have added two new Windows Live Writer Plugins to our offering with the help and support of the Live Writer developer community.  Our thanks go out to Scott Lovegrove who has carefully and lovingly created the Windows Live Writer TweetMeme plugin for WordPress.com along with the Windows Live Writer Follow Button Plugin.  Whilst he was on a role and doing these new plugins he also updated the much loved Windows Live Writer TweetMeme plugin to include support for hashtags.

We hope you like the plugins and if you are a developer and want to do cool stuff with our API’s then please do take a peak at our developer documents!  Tell us about your great creations and we’ll give you the spotlight!

Today we’re releasing a major upgrade to our platform that will significantly impact parts of our API. These changes are necessary to allow our platform to scale at the tremendous rate we’re seeing and provide vastly improved reliability.

/stories/tweets

The /stories/tweets API call now includes a “uuid” (a 32 char hex string) for each Tweet returned. This UUID represents the Tweets position within the timeline for that story. The from_id parameter, which used to accept the Tweet ID of the previous Tweet to page from now accepts the UUID of the previous Tweet to page from.  If you pass the Tweet ID instead, you will get an error.

This is the most disruptive change and only affects clients that page tweets. Your underlying paging logic can remain the same, but you will need to pass our API a different value for the from_id.

/stories/recent & /stories/popular

Both the /stories/recent and /stories/popular API calls will no longer accept a domain parameter. This is due to a performance issue that we have identified and we hope to restore this functionality in the coming months.

The Stories API docs have been updated with these changes, please refer to them for more details and examples.

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.
• 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