We’re pleased to announce that the TweetMeme Button Chrome Extension is now available for download from the Chrome Extensions website.

The extension allows you to take a little version of the TweetMeme Button with you everywhere on the web, showing live tweet counts for pages you are viewing, as well as providing quick tweeting of whatever you’re currently looking at.

Our standard Retweet Button is massively popular, and over half a billion of them are seen every day across a huge range of websites. But that doesn’t mean there will always be a retweet button at hand when you need one. So with the Chrome Extension, as soon as you discover the next hot article, blog post, picture or video, with just a few clicks you can have your customised tweet dispatched to your followers.

Help and support for the extension is available on our help forum.

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!

As many of you have probably already heard we’ve added a Live stream for tweetmeme.  We listened to everyone’s feedback and one thing that we got asked for so many times was live updates of our feeds.  We’ve just implemented the full feed for now but we are looking into doing the same for the main subject areas as well.

We decided to implement 2 retweets, 5, 10 and 20 with the default set to 5 as it was just too fast for most people on the 2 retweets, but we understand that some people may want to use the rss feed of 2 so didn’t exclude it completely.

You will also find that we have a play and pause button on the site which is there to pause the updates when you want to look at a series of tweets in more detail.  It does mean that you don’t have to get dizzy from watching all the tweets as they go by!!!  We saw a few comments on Twitter where people said it was making them dizzy, we hope they found the pause button!