Tweetmeme Ranks Your Links Into Twitter According To Popularity

The Twitter experience is very similar to walking on a busy street and catching partial conversations. That is why a lot of effort is ongoing to optimize scaling opportunities by categorising the various uses of Twitter. A new service called Tweetmeme picks up anyone posting links to content. It then tracks how many other mentions of the same link are made (much like the Technorati authority tracker of blogs). The result is presented on the site.

Tweetmeme is the latest in a series of add-on Twitter websites. Roughly speaking, many of these efforts involve the separation of the general chatter from the links that people input in their 140 character tweet space. Subsequently hoards and hoards of categories can be invented. Tweetmeme has done that for the links; the site makes use of PHP5 to track links to their final destination and identifies the categories (blogs, videos, images and audio). RSS feeds are available (even for the separate categories) and updates occur every five minutes.

It is great for getting an idea about what people tend link to on Twitter. Tweetmeme adds a lot of value to the Twittering world because it creates new insights into an otherwise fragmented scene. What’s more, just like ReporTwitters, the service allows you to play around with the timing of the fragments you want to catch up on, i.e. if you want to find out what people were talking about on Super Tuesday night, you can search under February 5 in the archived feeds. That is quite good.

The inventor of Tweetmeme, Nick Halstead, says that his reason to create the site was that he had spotted that many people have begun to use Twitter to find out what is ‘going on’. “What I believed was missing was a way to spot content that is posted on twitter and work out what is popular”, he writes on Tweetmeme's blog

Reviews have been positive. I am curious to find out just exactly what kind of traffic the service brings to bloggers who Twitter about their latest blog post and are tracked by Tweetmeme. I presume that for a link to qualify to the Tweetmeme it already has been receiving plenty of traffic, because otherwise it wouldn’t be there in the first place. Anyway, it’s well worth testing out (if only I could - somehow non US residents can’t get past the registration process and that’s a real shame. I am contacting Halstead to see if there’s a way around this.)

Disclosure: Angelique van Engelen runs a site called reporTwitters, which caters to twittering journalists. The above article has been published on the site's blog.