Tweetmeme launches massive upgrade to Version 2

UPDATE: The new version of Tweetmeme is live. Our initial thoughts, including screenshots, are below the original post.

You may have noticed that we haven’t had retweet buttons on today’s posts here at The Next Web. Why? They haven’t been working. Tweetmeme, the company behind our retweet buttons, took the service down for maintenance this morning with no warning and it’s still down now.

There’s good reason though, Tweetmeme Version 2 is launching imminently.

The upgrade sees the service take a step forward following the recent launch of competitor Retweet.com (which, it has been claimed, uses Tweetmeme code). Tweetmeme is also working with JS-Kit to incorporate Tweetmeme into its Echo blog comment system.

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Here’s what’s planned:

The upgrade is called Tweetmeme ‘V2’ as today’s release really is a complete revamp of the site that encompasses a total rewrite of the scoring system, filtering engine and a whole raft of user interface enhancements and tweaks. It also incorporates the new commenting system.

UPDATE: The new version is now live. So what’s it like?

The first upgrade we looked at is the analytics feature. For each retweeted post you get graphs for tweets in the past hour, tweets in the past day, a pie chart showing where tweets came from and analysis of recent retweets:

In addition, there’s a new comments tab allowing comments to be posted directly to Tweetmeme’s site. This can be posted to Twitter (via OAuth) with a link back to the discussion on Tweetmeme. Comments are displayed in pseudo-realtime like Facebook – a notification inviting you to refresh the page to see them. As you can see, Nick Halstead, CEO of Tweetmeme, replied to my comment. These replies can optionally be sent as Twitter replies too.

This is obviously an attempt to get more conversation happening directly on Tweetmeme. How likely this will be to happen, I’m not sure – Tweetmeme has always been about tracking Twitter links, not content discussion. Still, it’s an interesting move and one that sets it apart from Retweet.com.

Here’s the full changelog straight from Tweetmeme:

Highlights

·         The new ‘retweeting’ commenting platform
·         A new user timeline that shows retweets and comments in a river.
·         V3 of our Filtering Engine, codenamed ‘Pickle’
·         Better RSS feeds (by Category, Channel, User or Domain)
·         Simple story analytics (to be followed next week with full analytics package)
·         A new bookmarklet that lets you find any webpage back on TweetMeme.
·         A new ‘tweets’ analyzer that only shows ‘unique’ tweets for one particular story.

Ranking Content

The new site will have more varied and better quality content, this is achieved through better scoring of stories including a new ‘kudos’ score for individual Twitter users, plus we have a new ‘reporting’ mechanism allowing our users to flag content as abusive, spam or ‘This Sucks!’</p>

Filtering Content
The filtering engine is now at Version 3 codenamed ‘Pickle’ – this is our most advanced system yet allowing the real-time filtering of 10’s of millions of stories per day based upon our own programming language ‘Pickle Code’.  This release is future proof for scalability and also allows us to plug in new data sets as they become available. Included on the right is a screenshot of our tool that allows us to drag and drop rules that produces ‘Pickle Code’ – In the coming weeks we will do a feature on the architecture of this new system.

Commenting + Partnership Announcement
The new commenting system also goes live, this includes the ability to retweet individual comments (when they are good!) replying to multiple users, live updates and a really tight integration into Twitter.

TweetMeme is also working with the team at JS-Kit to import the comments into the Echo. TweetMeme will also be recommending and distributing Echo as the preferred solution to track the distributed conversation on blogs.

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