Bragging Tweets With TweetMeme
Fuck, I hate Twitter; yet another tool to allow people to collect, well… people really. As an example, I signed up for a Twitter account so I could test Twitter functionality for some projects I’m working on. I don’t use Twitter for anything but testing yet I get notices daily about users now following me (and none of them are readers of this blog).
Tweetmeme
Still, Twitter is all the rage and I do have to admit it is fun working with all the little toys people are making with the Twitter API (playing with the API is really FUN).
One such tool is TweetMeme.
Accoring to the TweetMeme site:
Tweetmeme is a service which aggregates all the popular links on twitter to determine which links are popular. Tweetmeme is able to categorize these links into categories and subcategories, making it easy to filter out the noise to find what your interested in.
We make it easy for you to subscribe to each category and the most popular through aur RSS feeds and Twitter accounts, you can find out more about theses through our help.
TweetMeme has a few ways to integrate their data into your site. The easiest way works by giving site owners a little sliver of JavaScript to embed in their site. The JavaScript adds a little button to the page for one click tweeting on Twitter.
<script type="text/javascript"><!--mce:0--></script> <script src="http://tweetmeme.com/i/scripts/button.js" type="text/javascript"><!--mce:1--></script>
The above creates a little icon:
TweetMeme Icon
In theory, the above is all you’ll need to do; just drop that slip into a page and you’re good to go. The reality is that there are a couple rules you need to follow.
First, make sure you’re using a custom title meta for your pages. If you don’t all your Tweets will have the same title. Not good.
Second, make sure the page in question is open to the Internet. Don’t try and lock the page behind a log in barrier or TweetMeme won’t be able to parse the page to get the URL and title information.
Last, TweetMeme caches the data so don’t expect the update to be instant; you will be disappointed. For example, on the Dark Void site we are constantly being hit up by the client about the delay. You probably won’t see the number in the widget increment for a bit; there’s nothing you can do about it.
TweetMeme also offers a widget, which I admit I haven’t used and but it looks like it’s basically the same thing as Tweetizen.
It should be noted that I wasn’t able to get the TweetMeme Widget to work. Ever. It just shows a blank page. Good job, TweetMeme.
And of course, there’s the TweetMeme API. You just have to have an API to be taken seriously. It does seem a little redundant to have an API that’s populated with data from the Twitter API but, whatever. I haven’t looked at the API too much either but it doesn’t look too outside the norm for most APIs.
Anyway, there you go; TweetMeme. Marketers love it. I’m ambivalent.
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The tweetmeme plugin is flawed, in that it does not pass xhtml validation. Luckilly you can manually put it into your theme. I’m planning to put it in my wordpress theme (which is nearly done, I may have some new posts by the time I comment here again, I hope
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Tweetmeme is a wonderful tool though. I’ve seen it popping up on an increasing number of blogs. As much as I hate to admit it, social media sites work for getting words out. I got drawn into using digg yesterday, because there are lots of interesting articles there.
You mention random followers. I get that a lot. People either find random people to follow or use tools to do it for them in the hope of getting lots of followers in return. Unfortunately, it works. People seem very eager to follow people back on twitter even if they’ll never read their tweets.
Yeah; I had to explain that TweetMeme was throwing errors and not my site when I did Dark Void. My boss was having a hard time with the idea that a company who’s product is code could write crappy code…
I like most of the social media sites though; Digg is cool. Reddit is pretty good. It’s just the social networking stuff that irritates me; specifically the people collecting.
I just don’t understand collecting followers (Twitter) and friends (MySpace & Facebook). Why do people do it? What is the appeal? Are there really people who are actually impressed by this? Like; “Oh wow! You have a million followers! Well, I’m impressed.”
I guess it’s all just about popularity and feeling better about themselves. Ashton Kutcher and CNN actually had a race to 1 million followers, which was “all the rage” at the time, for twitter worshipers anyway. They even had prizes: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/15/kutchercnn-twitter-fight-day-3-ea-ups-the-ante/