Today we’re launching a new feature on Topsy that we’re really excited about. We have enabled Twitter OAUTH to allow users to log in to Topsy via their Twitter account. This integration allows us to support more Twitter features on our site. The first OAUTH enabled feature that we’re launching is native Twitter retweets. This feature will allow users that have logged in to retweet from a Topsy page with a single click – cool!

If you check out the example trackback page below, you’ll see the login button in the top right and retweet buttons associated with the various tweets shown on the page. When you’re not logged in, clicking on a retweet button will forward you to Twitter where you can send the retweet via the Twitter web interface. When you are logged in, the retweet buttons will send native Twitter retweets instead, giving you the seamless ability to retweet from a Topsy page without being redirected to Twitter.

Example trackback page:

http://topsy.com/tb/www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/13/twitter-announces-a-retweeting-api/

We’re really excited about this release because it lays the foundation for a bunch of additional features that we’re working on for the Topsy site and for our plugins. Our next release is coming soon, but in the meantime send us feedback with your feature requests and we’ll see what we can do. Have fun retweeting!

Topsy is a new kind of search engine, with a new way of looking at the Internet. Topsy doesn’t think the Internet is a collection of documents. Or even a web of documents. Topsy sees the Internet as a stream of conversations. Topsy treats people differently from the web pages they create and the things they say. And Topsy sees that people in every community are connected in a web of relationships, where each person influences other people to read, talk and think about things.

Topsy is building the next generation platform for search and is looking to expand its team. We recently launched and have an immediate opening for the following position.

Job Responsibilities:

• Manage releases of Topsy search engine features and plugin products
• Write specs, prioritize features, build consensus in a high-powered engineering and operations team
• Manage timelines and dependencies between development tasks and available team resources
• Coordinate cross-team tasks
• Use the internal wiki and bug tracking system as project management tools
• Wear many hats

Requirements:

• 5+ years of project management experience in a consumer web or hosted service environment
• Proven skills in gathering requirements, triaging features and managing schedule risk
• Exceptional written and oral communication skills
• Ability to thrive in a fluid environment, where both long-term planning and short-term releases must be balanced
• Familiarity with Git, Trac, and Unix a plus
• Engineering background

If this is you, send your resume to jobs@topsy.com.

Topsy is a new kind of search engine, with a new way of looking at the Internet. Topsy doesn’t think the Internet is a collection of documents. Or even a web of documents. Topsy sees the Internet as a stream of conversations. Topsy treats people differently from the web pages they create and the things they say. And Topsy sees that people in every community are connected in a web of relationships, where each person influences other people to read, talk and think about things.

Topsy is building the next generation platform for search and is looking to expand its team. We recently launched and have an immediate opening for the following position.

• Contribute to the operation of an elegant distributed high-performance computing infrastructure. This is not a web farm.
• Support Linux-based production systems.
• Provide on-call and scheduled support for the production service.
• Support office network and hosted phone systems.

Required skills:

• Solid Linux systems administration skills
• Scripting for systems administration; one of Perl, PHP, Ruby.
• Ability to build a TCP/IP network, with address allocation, domain name services, mail services, web services, database services, file services, security services

Desired Skills:

• IMAP, LDAP, ICAL based services (Zimbra, Postfix)
• Nagios, Cacti
• RPM packaging; yum; kickstart; puppet
• Large-scale infrastructure experience (100s – 1000s of servers, 10K-100K processes)
• Network engineering (Cisco)
• MySQL administration

Topsy is a new kind of search engine, with a new way of looking at the Internet. Topsy doesn’t think the Internet is a collection of documents. Or even a web of documents. Topsy sees the Internet as a stream of conversations. Topsy treats people differently from the web pages they create and the things they say. And Topsy sees that people in every community are connected in a web of relationships, where each person influences other people to read, talk and think about things.

Topsy is building the next generation platform for search and is looking to expand its team. We recently launched and have an immediate opening for the following position.

Job responsibilities:

• Contribute to development and operation of an elegant distributed high-performance computing infrastructure. This is not a web farm.
• Linux super-sysadmin
• Network engineering and operation

Required skills:

• Expert Linux sysadmin for large-scale infrastructures (1000+ servers, 100K processes)
• Scripting/programming for systems administration. Work with the production platform as a programmable entity.
• Network and server capacity engineering
• RRDTool

Desired Skills:

• Ability to program (Perl, PHP, Ruby, Scala)
• MySQL administration and SQL programming
• Hadoop-based analysis (Hive, MapReduce)
• Search engine, social network experience
• puppet
• nagios

While the rest of you were out celebrating Halloween, Topsy was hard at work developing new treats for you. We’re releasing a bunch of them today!

TopLinks

First off, we’d like to announce Topsy TopLinks. TopLinks are collections of the top 100, 1000, and 5000 new links posted each day by influential people on Twitter. As interest in a link amongst influential people increases, the link moves from unranked to Top5k, Top1k, or all the way to Top100. You can think of it as a daily “best of the web” based on what is being shared by the Twitter user community.

TopLinks are searchable, so if you’re only interested in popular links about a particular topic, you can filter. In addition, TopLinks supports multiple languages - English, German, Japanese, and Portuguese — the most popular languages currently in use on Topsy. All of these features are available via the Topsy website and as RSS feeds, including feeds filtered by your search term.

Top100, 1k, and 5k:

http://topsy.com/top100

http://topsy.com/top1k

http://topsy.com/top5k

Example search within Top5k:

http://topsy.com/top5k?q=twitter+lists

Example RSS feed for Top100 links:

feed://otter.topsy.com/toplinks.rss

Example RSS feed for Top100 including the search term ‘linux’:

feed://otter.topsy.com/toplinks.rss?contains=linux

Topsy Plugin 1.0 for WordPress

In addition to TopLinks, we’re proud to announce that the Topsy WordPress Plugin has reached its first major release milestone of version 1.0. With this version, the plugin gains two exciting new features — TopLinks and Retweet support. When you use the plugin on a blog that features stories that are ranked in the Top5k, Top1k, or Top100, your blog will display a TopLinks badge next to the story, identifying it as one of the most influential stories of the day. The Topsy Plugin also now supports retweeting, allowing your readers to effortlessly RT your stories right from your blog.

Meanwhile, we’ve been upgrading the existing trackback features of the plugin. We’ve squashed some bugs and have made some changes to clean up the look of the comment text. We’ve also added a “Delete Trackback Comments” button that will help clean up any duplicate comments. Take a look at the plugin FAQ for more info.

Otter API

We’re also proud to announce the general release of our Otter API. We’ve seen a lot of interest in Otter during the beta period, and now that we’ve worked out the wrinkles, we’re ready to spread the word. Using Otter, anyone can write applications that take advantage of Topsy’s index and powerful features including search, author info, link stats, and more. Otter is so full featured that we implemented our WordPress plugin features entirely in Otter. So get creative and build some cool new apps! Go check out more here http://code.google.com/p/otterapi/

Topsy Website

While we’ve been busy working on TopLinks, the Wordpress plugin, and the API, we’ve also been making steady improvements to the Topsy web site. One of the features we’re most proud of is our trackback pages. Topsy Trackback pages let you see tweets about any link that has been posted on Twitter, e.g.

http://topsy.com/tb/www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/26/topsy-search-launches-retweets-are-the-new-currency-of-the-web/?infonly=1&sort_method=influence

These pages are packed with tons of features to let you explore and discover new and related content and users. The user who first tweeted a link is shown on the top right, mini-profiles of Twitter users are shown next to their tweets, related links, tags, and users are shown, and more. Go check ‘em out!

Topsy Trackbacks Bookmarklet

The best way to explore trackback pages is to find a page that you’re interested in on the web, and then check out the Topsy trackback page for it. You can do this by going to http://www.topsy.com/tb/<URL> to see the trackback page for any URL that has been tweeted, or better yet by using the convenient Topsy Trackback Bookmarklet. With the bookmarklet, you’re always one click away from connecting with a community of folks who are interested in whatever page you’re looking at.

http://labs.topsy.com/widgets/bookmarklet/

Advanced Query Syntax

In addition to trackback pages and other site improvements, we’ve also added some new advanced search queries.

from:<twitter username> – e.g. ‘from:Topsy influence’

Using this search query will limit your results to links about ‘influence’ that were posted by the Topsy account.

site:<domain> – e.g. ’site:techcrunch.com Topsy’

Using this search query will limit your results to links on the TechCrunch site that are about Topsy.

site:<sudomain.domain> – e.g. ’site:eu.techcrunch.com twitter‘

Using this search query will limit your results to links on the EU version of the TechCrunch site that include the term ‘twitter’.

site:<domain/firstpath> – e.g. ’site:wired.com/gadgets twitter’

Using this search query will limit your results to links that are within the gadgets section of the the wired.com site and include the term ‘twitter’.

Twitter Archive

Unlike most other sites that delete tweets after a few days or weeks, Topsy keeps every tweet in our index.  We keep them online and searchable forever. While this adds challenges for us, we think it makes our users happy, because the most interesting links aren’t always the newest. As of today, our Twitter index has reached it’s one year birthday and includes every tweeted link going back one full year. Just a babe, but growing fast! Help us wish a happy birthday to our index by checking out all of the other folks who are celebrating a birthday on Twiter today!

http://topsy.com/s?q=happy+birthday

Connect with Topsy

Whew! That’s all for now. As you can see, we’ve been busy, but we’re hard at work on even more new features. To stay up to date on the latest Topsy offerings, so be sure to follow @Topsy on Twitter and check out http://labs.topsy.com often. If you have feedback, feature requests, questions, or just want to say hello, email us at feedback@topsy.com. Thanks!

TopLinks are a live continuously updating collection of feeds of the top 100, 1000, and 5000 new links posted every day by influential people on Twitter. TopLinks are computed based on the number of tweets for each link and the aggregate influence of twitter users who have tweeted the link within the first 24 hours of the first tweet.

During the first 24 hours, if a link rises in popularity amongst influentials, the link may move from Top5k to Top1k to Top100.  Once a link earns a Top100, 1k or 5k badge, it keeps it forever – think of it like the opening night sales for a film. If you install the Topsy Plugin for WordPress, TopLinks badges that your stories earn will be displayed alongside the stories.

See the Top 100
See the Top 1K
See the Top 5K

Wait a minute you say – isn’t this is a real-time feed? How does Topsy know what links are TopLinks so quickly?  Normally, such a list would require waiting a full 24 hours after a link is first posted. In order to provide a real-time feed, Topsy does not wait for the day to be over. Instead, Topsy generates a predictive list based on the number of tweets and the influence of those who tweeted the previous day’s top links.

TopLinks are currently shown for recent tweets from he past week, but Topsy will soon show older TopLinks as well, over the entire collection of tweeted links collected by Topsy over the past year.

We’ve got two new things for you to play around with this weekend. First off, we just released our new Topsy Trackbacks Bookmarklet. This item allows you to go from any web page straight to Topsy’s trackback summary for that page. You can instantly see who’s tweeting about the page, and what they’re saying. Here’s an example of Topsy’s trackbacks about USA Today’s update on the LCROSS mission (as compared with the original page).

The bookmarklet will work with Internet Explorer 7 and up, and with modern versions of Firefox and Safari. Sorry, Google Chrome users, but Chrome doesn’t seem to have any way of using bookmarklets.

WordPress Plugin Update: Version 0.9.2

And our Topsy Plugin for WordPress is growing by leaps and bounds — today marks the second update, to version 0.9.2. This is a big release, and there’s a little something in there for everyone:

1. For bloggers who use themes that only display comments (not trackbacks), we’ve added a feature that allows you to make the trackback comments show up as comments.
2. For those who post their own tweets linking back to their blog entries, we’ve added a feature that allows you to block any Twitter user’s tweets from becoming trackback comments. Just add your own username (or the username of any spammer that’s bothering you), and the plugin will ignore their tweets.
3. And for everyone that uses the plugin, we’ve made @usernames and #hashtags automatically show up as clickable hyperlinks.

You can get plugin version 0.9.2 right here. Or you can always get the latest version from the plugin’s own page at http://labs.topsy.com/widgets/wordpress/. Tell your friends. Share and enjoy!

And, as always, we’d love to know what you think of it. We’ve already got some features planned out for next week, some of which are based on user requests. If you’ve got an idea, just send it to feedback@topsy.com — and thank you for your support.

We’re hard at work improving our new plugin for WordPress, and today marks our first upgrade. We’re big fans of the open-source software motto of “release early and often”, and so we’ve already found some ways to improve the plugin.

We’ve gotten rid of the English-language “On Twitter, (someone) said” text, so the text of the comment is just the tweet text itself. This means international bloggers using other languages no longer have to hack the plugin code to change the wording. In addition, the plugin now respects the Otter API’s rate limits, and reports its version number in the settings screen. (Click “Topsy Widgets” under the “Settings” menu in your blog dashboard to see what version you’re running. If it doesn’t give a version number, you’re on the initial, v0.9.0, release.)

To upgrade to version 0.9.1 of the Topsy plugin, just click here to download the install file. Unzip it, and copy the “topsy” directory into your WordPress “plugins” directory. Yup, it’s just like an install, and you don’t even have to deactivate and reactivate the plugin.

More improvements should be coming very soon — we’ve got a lot planned for this software!

The long-awaited Topsy plugin for WordPress is now available for beta testing.

When people tweet about your blog post, the plugin automatically discovers the tweet via Topsy and embeds it in the comment section of the blog post. Tweets are integrated as “native” WordPress comments: they follow your blog’s theme and become an integral part of the conversation on your blog. The effect is too wonderful to describe and the Topsy plugin is currently the only plugin for WordPress that is able to do this.

We have a lot planned for this plugin, but the first beta version is now available. If you run a WordPress blog, we encourage you to try it out now.

Learn more about the Topsy WordPress Plugin

In addition, we’ve just released a Topsy browser search bar plugin for browsers that support the OpenSearch standard. You’re probably used to searching Google (or some other search engine) from the search bar in the top right corner of your browser — now, you can add Topsy to the list of engines your browser recognizes.

The search bar plugin works in Firefox 3.0 and greater, and in Internet Explorer 7.0 and greater. In Google Chrome, you may have to make Topsy the default search engine in order to get any use out of the plugin.

Learn more about the Topsy Browser Search Plugin

We plan to have a few other useful widgets and plugins available in a few more weeks, too. In the meantime, be sure to let us know what you think of these two.

Topsy maintains a trackback page for every URL posted on Twitter.  The trackback pages got upgraded this morning – they now list the first tweeter, other popular URLs on the same domain, and the authors associated with the domain name (which allows you to put a Twitter account to any website).   See the new trackback page for this Engadget story.  You can also type in a short url in the Topsy search box and it will take you to its trackback page.

Enjoy.