Today over on Building 43 Nick Halstead and Robert Scoble got together to bring you an interesting conversation about Twitter’s latest updates and in particular talk about the future of the Twitter ecosystem.  Nick focuses in this interview on the new Annotation feature that Twitter presented at their recent Chirp conference.

The conversation is well worth a listen to as it delves into how standards could be used to define the approach with annotations and the potential use cases for such meta data.

What do you think?  Is Nick right about how he thinks annotations will effect the ecosystem sorrounding Twitter?  What do you think of the feature and how would you like to see TweetMeme using it?

TweetMeme is launching Adtweets! Nick Halstead is at the Real-Time Crunchup in San Francisco today to reveal and demo our new, and exciting product! The idea behind this product was based around wanting to reward advertisers for using great, interactive and engaging adverts.  The Adtweets are a way of putting pressure on advertisers to improve the standard of adverts, and give the audience a chance to decide, and essentially vote, on what they like. Produce a good advert that your audience likes, and you can easily tap into the viral nature of Twitter and the ‘retweet effect’, which will then dramatically increase your reach.

The system is very simple and the TweetMeme Retweet Button can be integrated into any standard IAB advertisement size. Advertisers have the choice between our compact button, or our standard button…..and of course you can use our TweetMeme Analytics to easily monitor the success of your campaign. The Adtweets can be served on any website, as well as on TweetMeme.com. With the support of Federated Media there is a large pool of publishers able to give advertisers a targeted audience of  social media friendly readers, who are likely to retweet engaging adverts to their friends and Followers.

TweetMeme is also re-launching Featured Tweets….Even more powerful, to help promote particular stories, and encourage the sharing of important content to other Twitter users.  The potential value of the featured tweets was apparent in the first version, but there were some essential elements missing. After taking on board invaluable feedback from both users and customers, the service was suspended. It was back to the drawing board, and what has emerged is a new Featured Tweet system that sponsors can use to bring relevent news and stories quickly to the attention of the TweetMeme Community, who then have the opportunity to retweet the story to their Twitter Followers and so on.

The aim of this system is to give potentially viral stories a little helping hand. The improvements include better targeting of your Featured Tweet, analytics to track your story, a simple, easy to use interface, and a reduced number of sponsored stories per page.  The result? An immediate increase in exposure, an encouragement in the spread of content, increased traffic and more Twitter Followers – for sponsors….And a happier user base, with only 1 sponsored story per page.

Want to find out more, have any questions, or want to be one of the first to take advantage of this, please contact sales@tweetmeme.com!

Today we launched an update to our TweetMeme Widget. We have a number of new features that are integrated into the new widget. These include the ability to filter content in the widget by category, channel and domain.  This is giving you the user far more control over the information that you show in your widget.

For those of you who have had or are currently considering purchasing one of our custom channels this means that you can now use the widget in your own site to show the content of your own channel.

Also for those of you who have larger websites along the lines of Mashable and Techcrunch, you should find that you can track the top stories on your own domain through the widget too (this is a very new feature and as such please treat it as a beta feature). See the example widget below for the Formula 1 custom channel.  Also take a look at the widget page and see how much more useful it is now than it was.

If you have feedback or suggestions on the widget then please pop here and let us know what you think.

Interested in having a custom channel built for your brand or company then get in touch and we’ll be happy to discuss this further with you.