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.

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?

We are proud to announce that we shall be exhibiting at the Internet World conference next week!

Internet World is Europe’s longest running, best attended and biggest annual event for digital marketing and online business. The event will be packed with a host of great exhibitors, and hundreds of informative keynote and seminar sessions. The event is being held at Earls Court, London, from 27-29th April and entry is free – click here to register!

We will be positioned at stand number E3086, and will be there to talk all things TweetMeme including;

The Retweet Button
The Follow Button
Channels
AdTweets
Featured Tweets

Email us to book an appointment with a member of the TweetMeme team for anytime across the three days! We look forward to seeing you there!

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

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!

It was decided today that we don’t tell you enough about what goes on behind the scenes at TweetMeme; in other words, what we do in the office when we aren’t busy keeping you updated with the latest Twitter news and making sure the site works well!

So, here is a quick rundown of the past couple of days…

The first thing to mention is that @nicktelford celebrated his birthday this week! He was brought some pink balloons and some lovely presents which all related to his favourite celebrity — Miley Cyrus. Needless to say he was ecstatic when he opened them! To make his day even better we then played his new Miley Cyrus CD… unfortunately that was short lived due to “noise” complaints from other companies in the building. Clearly they didn’t appreciate Miley as much as we did!

In other news… when I started working for TweetMeme almost 3 weeks ago I was a girl with a slight Facebook obsession. Unfortunately, working for a company which runs a Twitter app, this was not acceptable for certain members of the TweetMeme team (*cough* @dtsn and @chris_alexander). So 6 days ago they started the process of “converting” me over to Twitter. While I hate to admit it, they were successful, and I now have two programmes on my computer which will keep me updated with Twitter, as well as my Twitter homepage permenantly being open on my browser. This caused everyone at TweetMeme to use Twitter as the “water cooler”… rather than turning around to talk to one another, we now just converse via Twitter instead… (talking is so overrated!!)

Finally, the TweetMeme Nazbatag Bunny needs a special mention. She is currently taking a holiday to the other end of the office, so has been keeping me entertained and Chris annoyed for the past week… it has been very fun making her send Twitter updates of the wrong time! Today Chris did something very foolish and created a programme which allows us to send messages that Bunny will read out (something tells me he immediately regretted it!). If you want to see what Bunny is saying to all of us, feel free to follow her via Twitter.

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.

Earlier in the week we had a chat with Guy Kawasaki about integration of the TweetMeme content and button into AllTop and as a result TweetMeme is now on Alltop.com http://tweetmeme.alltop.com/.

As you may have already noticed Alltop is a great new way to read all our different feeds and in terms of our content it takes the top stories and aggregates them to give you a quick and simple view of what we have on our site.  Feel free to take a peak and let us and Guy know what you think.

Our thanks on this one to @guykawasaki and his team for getting it all sorted out it looks great and we look forward to seeing what happens next with it.

Today we updated the TweetMeme site with some new features and some UI changes.  We are hoping that this will help you find your way around the site easier and quicker as well as find additional information on re-tweets around your stories.

So first of all we added the Follow on Twitter link.  This gives users the ability to follow a specific channel or the top level TweetMeme accoount.  You’ll find the Follow next to our Subscribe button and under the Sign in area on the top right of the page.

Secondly we’ve made it easier to find our channels on TweetMeme.  So now you can find our channels in our sub menu next to the Live button, as well as down the right hand side of our site showing the top channels on TweetMeme.

We have a variety of different channels that may be of interest to our readers including the recently added World Wide Developer Conference Channel and the Le Mans racing channel amongst others.

And finally we’ve done an update on our TweetMeme button.  The basics of the button remain the same, it still does the re-tweets via the re-tweet section of the button, but now we’ve also linked the top part of the button to the story page on TweetMeme relating to that story.  This means that people can see the most recent re-tweets from people and the trending graph of re-tweets for that story.

We hope you like the updates and if you find any bugs or have any suggestions relating to these new features then please let us know over on our forum.