Back at the beginning of 2009 we produced a little green web button that counted how many times users shared a link on Twitter. We started out with a simple idea ‘How can we get more people to share content on Twitter’ – and today we return to that simple thought.

We have grown to more than 750 million daily retweet button impressions, which for a tiny team is an amazing achievement. That said the market requires an official solution that can accelerate this growth. So today Twitter is launching its own Tweet Button and we are very pleased to be partnering with them to continue to grow the overall Twitter ecosystem.

What does this mean? Firstly we will be assisting Twitter with the technical challenges involved with the button and secondly we will be working even more closely in the future on delivering real-time curation of the Twitter Firehose. This will manifest itself in the launch of a number of new products and the first of these is being unveiled today.

DataSift gives developers the ability to leverage cloud computing to build very precise streams of data from the millions and millions of tweets sent every day.

• Tune tweets through a graphical interface or our bespoke programming language
• Streams consumable through our API and real-time HTTP
• Comment upon and rank streams created by the community
• Extend one or more existing streams to create super streams

Find out more on the new DataSift blog or follow @datasift

For press enquiries send emails to press (at) tweetmeme.com

UPDATE:

Robert Scoble has posted a video interview with Nick Halstead, Founder of TweetMeme discussing the Twitter Buttons and the new product DataSift.

In response to feedback from some of our larger publishers, we are proud to announce the launch of TweetMeme Pro.

TweetMeme continually looks to improve its service and develop new ways for our publishers to integrate seamlessly. The company has grown substantially over the past year and now serves in the region of 700M buttons per day on around 250,000 sites.

We understand that it is important to provide the option of delivering a branded experience for its users through improved delivery and the ability to customise the button.

The TweetMeme Pro Button provides support for:

• Up to 10 UTM tracking codes within the button
• Customisation on the design of the button
• Customisation on the design of the pop-up box
• Dedicated servers to ensure high reliability and performance
• The best user + publisher Retweet experience*
• 100% accurate Retweet counts*
• URL Shortener Support (including BIT.LY Pro)*
• Web, RSS, Email and Mobile support*
• Support for HashTags + Whitespace*
• International language support*

The TweetMeme Pro solution means you will be able to track the performance of tweets made through the button, and deliver a fully branded experience to your users.

Existing sites already using the TweetMeme Pro solution include:

As of today we are already serving 80 million Pro buttons daily using a combination of co-location and dedicated servers. TweetMeme’s hosting partner, DediPower, not only supports the 700 million standard retweet buttons that we serve each day, but also provides the high capacity, on-demand infrastructure required to cope with our growing Pro and standard button-base.

To find out how you can use TweetMeme Pro please take a look at our website or sign-up.

* – Features also included in the standard TweetMeme Retweet Button.

The TweetMeme Wiki is now live for those of you who would like to help translate the TweetMeme plug-in to other languages. It doesn’t matter how big or small the contribution is, we appreciate it all. We hope to have completed full translations for as many different languages as you the community provide very soon.

You can find the wiki at: tweetmeme.wikispaces.com

Editing privileges is available to members of the wiki only, so a quick sign-up on the site will allow you to start contributing there and then.

Current languages available to help translate:
Arabic, Bengali, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

We are also open to languages not currently shown on the wiki, just edit away using the same template layout as our other languages.  If there are any translations that people feel need discussion please do this on the discussion section of the page where there is a discrepancy.

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 are proud to announce their latest partnership with Federated Media and Toyota, in the creation of Toyota Conversations!

You will notice that within this channel some of TweetMeme’s latest tools and technologies are being showcased, including our Featured Tweets to deliver the latest news directly from Toyota’s Press Room, and AdTweets (ReTweetable adverts) in the right hand side bar.  In fact if you look at the sidebar specifically you will see it is fully customised with all the important news and information for Toyota customers.  The site itself is hosted on an external domain and if you leave a comment on the site the Toyota Conversations Twitter account is immediately notified as comments are retweetable and linked to their Twitter account.

Any questions, or for more information about the channel – please do not hesitate to get in touch!

Today are launching the really useful TweetMeme Twitter Follow Button, this feature will help you and your readers to find and follow one another on Twitter!  The button has been designed for simplicity and comes in three styles as shown below.  The Follow button does not redirect the user to Twitter it instead uses the Twitter OAuth access just like our ReTweet button.

The Follow Button also has a live counter so that you can see visually if the user is worth following just based upon the count and matches the style and ability of the TweetMeme ReTweet button.  The Follow button also knows who you are already following and shows the + sign to remind you to add the new users that you discover through the Follow Button.  After all it is also a comfort to know yes, I am already following them, or how did I forget to follow this user! I must add them!

Compact: 

Normal:

Square:

Once clicked on the follow button provides you with the following features:

• Twitter Profile Picture
• Real Name
• Twitter Username
• Twitter profile description
• Following / Follower Count
• Recent Links that have been retweeted

The button also integrates with three of the most popular Twitter user profiling systems to provide you with some great additional user analysis tools to help you decide whether you want to follow people.

Twitter Counter

Twitter Counter is a great way to visually understand how a Twitter user is gaining extra followers.

Twitalyzer

Twitalyzer lets you at a glance see how a Twitter user interacts, giving simple metrics on Engagement, Impact and Influence.

Twitter Grader

Twitter Grader takes a Twitter and compares you with every other Twitter user based upon power and reach and gives you a overall grade.

Alongside the new button which is currently available as Javascript for you to embed into your site, we have also created a WordPress Plugin and anticipate other plugins will follow.  The WordPress plugin is designed to dramatically increase the scope of the follow button by improving the take up by the ‘long tail’.

The plugin is an easy opportunity for users to use the button.  The plugin provides 3 useful features, the biggest of which is the ability to replace the standard comment avatar with a follow button. We also add in a WordPress sidebar widget and the ability to add the follow button to posts on a per-author basis.

Sidebar Widget

Settings

TweetMeme has been chosen by a judging panel including Deborah Meaden and other leading entrepreneurs such as Bebo Founder Michael Birch as a winner of Smarta.com’s inaugural ‘Smarta 100’.

The Smarta 100 is the ultimate business accolade, recognizing the UK’s smartest small businesses. Smarta.com has uncovered remarkable companies who have gone the extra mile to differentiate themselves from the market or found clever ways to compete, from their marketing plan to their ethical stance. The result is a fascinating insight into the unique business ideas that are thriving in the current economic climate.

The finalists proved to the judges that they have what it takes to run a successful venture, from spotting a new opportunity to making it a reality. And the high-profile panel were delighted to see that ambitious people are saving hard and raising finances to turn their ideas into flourishing businesses.

Deborah Meaden commented:

“Discovering great new businesses is a passion of mine as is encouraging businesses to think and work better.  The Smarta 100 does both of these things – and celebrates the best of British business at the same time. I was delighted to see ambitious people saving hard and raising finances to turn their ideas into flourishing businesses ”

Smarta.com founder Sháá Wasmund said:

“Socially conscious, disruptive businesses that are not afraid to challenge the status quo are being set up in the four corners of the country. I founded Smarta to make sure these enterprises are supported at any stage of development. The results speak for themselves – the Smarta 100 list is a collection of remarkable success stories.”

The full results and details of the winning companies can be found at smarta.com/smarta100.

It always amazes me how things converge onto a point in what seems to be complete coincidence, but when it happens time and again you see that it is just a natural convergence of multiple minds pushing forward ideas towards a natural conclusion.

And so when I arrived at the Techcrunch Crunchup I was not surprised to find that a number of companies (including Twitter themselves ) would be talking about Twitter based advertising.

I was also at the Crunchup to announce our own new Twitter advertising model called Adtweets – which is a new ad-platform that allows established ad-networks to leverage the power of the retweet (something we feel we have extensive knowledge within.) by allowing current display adverts to gain a retweetable element. If you want to read the full details we have a separate post.

Retweet Analytics

I wanted to share some fascinating numbers on how content gets disseminated across twitter via Retweets, we recently launched our own Analytics package that allows individual stories to be analysed in great detail.

An interesting fact that has an immense impact for anyone trying to advertise on Twitter is that when I analysed 20 of the top tier Twitter accounts (e.g. with followers of more than 500,000) I found that on average only 35% of the retweets that a link gained were directly originated from their own Twitter account.

So as an example a recent Mashable story with 1598 retweets I found that only 586 were a direct result of their pushing it out to the@mashable Twitter account (which has 1,751,213 followers) and the largest proportion (825 of them) was in fact from originating retweets (e.g. clicking our retweet button).

The second interesting set of numbers is the click data that then results from all those retweets – again from the same story we find that it was clicked 12558 times (split across 5 different shortener services) of that total 8196 were direct (e.g. mostly from Twitter clients such as Seesmic, Tweetdeck) 2896 were from the Twitter.com and the 1539 were from 80+ other Twitter web based clients.

What do I draw from these facts? The first is that any model must be inclusive of external clients. So in the instance of Robert Scoble’s ‘SuperTweets‘ the Twitter clients will need a big incentive to display those adverts – e.g. a revenue share. My gut feeling is that in-tweet advertising is still the only effective route forward – just because it applies to the KISS principle.

My second conclusion is that distribution into the mainstream Twitter user-base is absolutely crucial to getting the message heard by the greatest number of users.

Lastly I would like to show you the kind of advertising that I think is the future – and that works perfectly with a model of retweeting. [disclosure: Sun Microsystems is a partner of TweetMeme]

Full details of our own advertising platform can be found here.

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!

Over the past few months, at every event we’ve been to Nick and I have been taking a small quantity of TweetMeme t-shirts with us to hand out to people we know and who love to tweet!  On Thursday Kate and I will be at Social Media 09 and if those attending are lucky then we may just bring a few more with us to the event!

Here’s a few pics of the different designs.  The choice of descriptions actually came out of a sticker design competition we ran a while back, the details of our imaginative Twitter fans can be found here! We have male & female in a range of sizes so no one feels left out!

By pure chance today the top story over on TweetMeme has been this one about cool Geek T-shirts!  Maybe our ones will get in there when we give out more of them!  If you are wanting exposure at events and want to sponsor your logo on the next batch of our tshirts then do get in touch with us as we are looking into getting another batch printed soon.  This batch have our partners Dedipower and Sun StartUp Essentials on them!