The Tweetmeme Ping Tool

The tweetmeme API is pretty neat: given a long link, it will tell you how many times that link has been tweeted. And it even works, which is nice.

Well, it works most of the time.

On my recent post on the origin of perfect software, I looked over at my custom Tweetmeme badge and saw that this story which had just been published had 42147 tweets. Now, my work is good, but it’s not that good.

Now, I wrote that Tweetmeme badge myself, so I know how it works. (I’m trying to publish a module for it through drupal.org, but the bureaucracy has been slow. I’ll keep you posted.) Anyway, my first stop was the source of the information, the Tweetmeme API. The URL for my post is http://www.sigpwned.com/content/origin-perfect-software, so I pulled down the API link at http://api.tweetmeme.com/url_info.json?url=http://www.sigpwned.com/content/origin-perfect-software, which told me some interesting things:

1. Tweetmeme thinks my post has 42147 shares on Twitter. (It doesn’t.)
2. Tweetmeme thinks my blog post was shared in a tweet “2012 BMW M1 #Speckled #upon a #Highway: Ah yes, we’ve been watchful upon this automobile for… http://goo.gl/fb/dbKcs”. (It wasn’t.)
3. Tweetmeme thinks my post is hosted on allaboutauto.us. (It isn’t.)

So, basically, Tweetmeme has a bug.

No big deal. I let it sit overnight, hoping the issue will clear itself up, but it doesn’t. A quick Google search leads me to the Tweetmeme Ping tool, which politely asks Tweetmeme to refresh my page info. Perfect! I throw my URL at the Ping tool, and voila! My data is updated in about an hour, and my Tweetmeme badge is behaving correctly again.

So, if you ever hit a Tweetmeme bug, the Tweetmeme Ping tool might be your best friend. (For google search, the post ID I got was 875208442. I’m gonna laugh really hard when this gets a search hit.)