The emergence of Tweetmeme during the period I wasn’t blogging was interesting – I spent a fair amount of time reading content on sites, and even clicked the tweet buttons occasionally.
This post has now been updated with an official response from Tweetmeme – the features have now been added to the development timeline.
The Tweetmeme site is a useful content source, but this article is mainly about the Tweetmeme buttons.
Adding something to your blog, especially something that can encourage viral behavior and add social proof is highly beneficial, and doing it correctly, without asking for passwords offers huge advantages.
Twitter is also a medium that is marketing content tollerant, as long as the people following you are marketers, unlike Digg, Reddit, and to a lesser extent Stumbleupon.
Thus I have spent some time delving into the code and API for Tweetmeme and the existing WordPress plugin. It has just been updated, thus if you download the Tweetmeme plugin, it will be the latest version.
Important New Features
- Cleaned up cookie use a little, but it would be better if they set a cookie based on an action, rather than a display.
The original RFC for cookies states that browser support for cookies should be a minimum of:-- 300 cookies in total
- 20 cookies per domain
- 4095 bytes per cookie
To be perfectly honest, I don’t want all those cookies, whether they are 1st party or 3rd party.
- Ability to brand the retweets with @andybeard etc, though you still get “via @tweetmeme” at the end
- The button is removed from excerpts using a filter on get_the_excerpt() – more on that to follow
However essential features of Tweetmeme and Tweetmeme Button are missing if it is going to be used by serious marketers.
