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.

• bit.ly – (API support coming soon.)
• awe.sm – (API supported)
• cli.gs – (API support coming soon.)
• digg.com (API supported)
• is.gd
• TinyURL.com
• tr.im
• su.pr – (API supported)
• ow.ly – (API support coming soon.)
• lopurls.us
• twurl.nl

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.

We never rest on our laurels here at TweetMeme HQ and have been beavering away on a range of improvements. I wanted to give you a sneak peak at a few new buttons launching next week.

Firstly one big change we have already made is to remove the (via @tweetmeme) from the end of any retweets. This will give a little more room at the end of tweets to be retweeted again.

Image Button

The current retweet button is a clever little thing – it can redirect you to Twitter to retweet but also if your logged into TweetMeme (via OAuth) it sends the tweet behind the scenes and leaves you on the site you were currently browsing, this we call ‘one-click retweeting’. The downside is that Javascript can only live in certain places on the web, i.e. in a web browser.

We think there are lots of other places you may want to get retweeted from so we have come up with ‘image buttons’. These look identical to the current retweet button (an example is on the right) with the same live-retweet count, the big difference is that it is rendered as a image which means you can put it anywhere that you can put a normal image. Here are some ideas we had for using it,

• RSS Feeds – JavaScript does not work inside RSS (most RSS readers strip it out because of XSS security issues) so the button is perfect to allow your users to read your article and then retweet it.
• Emails – You can embed it into an HTML email to promote any link you like.
• WordPress.com – Some sites like wordpress.com do not allow you to embed Javascript, but you can use this button instead.

Domain Count

We wanted a way that sites could show off how much they are getting retweeted beyond just the individual story retweet counts. So we came up with the ‘Weekly Retweet’ chicklet, it shows the weekly total number of retweets for your whole website. The counter re-calculates every 24 hours and the colour can be customized (examples on the right).

Analytics

Lastly we will be soon launching a much more detailed analytics package for website owners. You can already use TweetMeme to track the trend of a particular story (example here) and get the list of people who retweeted the story.

Websites can already track their weekly trends of retweets using TweetMeme (Example here) this is useful, but we wanted to give much more detail. The new package is aimed at fully understanding how your story spread and how you may adapt future story releases to take best advantage of Twitter and its amazing viral nature.

We’ve been continuing to keep an eye on the different URL shortener trends and thought that we would show you the effect of Twitter moving it’s default shortening service from TinyURL to Bitly.  Here at Tweetmeme, we’re constantly downloading and storing your tweets with links in, so we’re in a unique position of being able to tell you exactly how many of you are using which URL-shortening service, and how they’re competing. We’ve taken todays data from Tweetmeme , and compiled the top 5 URL shorteners to give you the graph below.

The Stats:
tinyurl.com:    44.8455%
bit.ly:    43.3557%
is.gd:    5.479%
tr.im:    3.8395%
ow.ly:    2.4803%

We then went through our entire database of URL’s that we’ve seen and created the comparison graph of the overall stats for URL shorteners.  We’ll leave you to make your own conclusions about how influential Twitters choices are in terms of the services that they use and the impact that they have on companies.

And the stats behind this one:

tinyurl.com:    67.741%
bit.ly:    20.7948%
is.gd:    4.9303%
ff.im:    3.8137%
tr.im:    2.7202%

And you too can see the latest stats from TweetMeme at the bottom of our site.  The stats update on the hour every hour.  It should be of interest to anyone wanting to use the most common url shorteners then this is a good place to find out which one really is the most commonly used one.