Tag Archives: twitter
Today we got a short but surprising e-mail. It was from Gov. Schwarzenegger’s technical team, they were integrating our TweetMeme button into their website! So we thought we’d nip over and see how they were getting on with it. Lo and behold it was up and in the Newsroom area of the site for all their latest press releases!
We have to say we were pretty impressed at them integrating the button into the site, we’d had no direct contact with them until that e-mail and all of a sudden there it was right up there. I wonder how they heard about it and who told them… We do hope other companies start looking at this and see how it can benefit them getting their press releases and latest news onto the Twittersphere.
So if you are inspired by the use of our button on the California State and want it on your own site all you need to do is pop here and install it!
We have been rather busy with all the updates to tweetmeme and so had not got round to looking at the daily statistics we collect on which URL shorteners get used the most on twitter. I peeked at the data tonight and was surprised at what I found. Firstly BIT.LY has gained nearly 3% market share in the space of 3 weeks (last time we reported was 23rd March). Also IS.GD gained 1% and now taken up 3rd place, overall this means TINYURL.COM has lost over 3%.
TINYURL is really only holding this because twitter uses it as it’s core shortening service – but does not have the features of some of its rivals, how long twitter keeps it this way is matter up for much debate.
| Service |
Percentage |
Change |
| tinyurl.com |
72.17% |
-3.31% |
| bit.ly |
15.65% |
2.63% |
| is.gd |
5.2421 |
0.88% |
| ff.im |
4.617 |
-0.25% |
| twurl.nl |
2.315 |
0.05% |
I find the content that comes through twitter amazingly varied, this is both great for getting interesting content, but also with the growth of twitter a lot of the content can be outside my personal zone of interest. So today we start along a path of categorizing the content so that it is easier for users to find the top stories that they have a particular interest within.
Channels
The concept of hashtags is well known on twitter and we wanted to leverage the hard work some twitter users put in hashtagging content correctly. We have built a engine that picks out #hashtags and keywords and uses that data to selectively put stories into relevant channels.
We have put together 4 simple channels live today and will be looking for ideas from the community on the kind of channels they would like to see built. This is a very much proof-of-concept and there is a lot of tweaking still to be done.
If you have ideas on what kind of channels you would like to see us build (they dont take long to setup!) please drop us a comment or use the feedback tab.
Today we will be launching a whole new revenue model based upon twitter. Our popular story aggregator Tweetmeme is allowing paying customers to sponsor a story. This can either be a story of their choice e.g. a link to a blog post, website or they can sponsor any link/story already within Tweetmeme. Using the Direct Message functionality the sponsor sends Tweetmeme the URL of the story they wish to sponsor, they can only sponsor a new story every 24 hours.
The sponsors story is listed in the sidebar on the frontpage and the story is specially highlighted in our ‘recent stories’ to show it is sponsored.
We believe this gives businesses and brands a unique way to attach their twitter account to their own stories or stories which relates to them. Tweetmeme which has RSS feeds, a twitter account which pushes stories and a slick interface gives those new to social media an easy route to build a presence on twitter.
At the same time as launching the revenue model we also release a range of new features that make tweetmeme the service even more attractive to its users.
- New ‘recent stories’ default frontpage
- New ‘incoming stories’ see new links as they flow into tweetmeme
- Better RSS feed – includes blog excerpts, retweet button and thumbnails.
That on top of the other recent features that makes tweetmeme the best in class.
- Mobile version – http://m.tweetmeme.com – [more details]
- Button + Wordpress Plugin – our unique retweet + tweet count button makes it easy for users to retweet onto twitter
- Categorized Content
- Thumbnails for images/videos
The following was posted on the twitter development talk forum by Alex Payne.
Due to abusive behavior we’ve been forced to temporarily disable our
Jabber/XMPP services. PubSub subscriptions, tweet deliver, updating,
tracking, and all other Jabber features will be unavailable until
further notice. We’ll attempt to resolve this as soon as possible.
Apologies for the inconvenience.
Tweetmeme relies upon this Jabber/XMPP feed so the site will not start working again until Twitter re-enables the feed.
The source of the problem? The spammers, we have seen a massive increase in the scammers/spammers trying to abuse twitter and it would not surprise me if they had found new and interesting ways to use the jabber interface to do naughty things.
We hope twitter will sort this out soon as we have a load of new features we were working on for tweetmeme, so watch this space.
For updates on what we are doing in the future on tweetmeme/fav.or.it follow me on twitter
UPDATE: Twitter have posted a blog post about it. They now hope to have everything back up and running by sometime Saturday (US time)
