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.

Job Responsibilities

• Rapid prototyping of IR related product features on very large datasets
• Design and evolution of search algorithms
• Data quality and search results quality analysis
• Keeping on top of current IR research and practice

Required Skills

• Practical knowledge of Information Retrieval and text search
• Practical experience converting papers into code
• 3+ years in C++
• 3+ years experience writing one or more of Java, Perl or Python
• 3+ years experience with R & Matlab

Desired Skills

• Practical experience with distributed computing and clustering architectures
• Practical experience with development on Unix
• Practical experience with database design
• Practical experience with Hadoop
• Encyclopedic knowledge of Monty Python

If this is you, send us your resume at jobs@topsy.com. See Work at Topsy for more details.

Topsy now supports the special site and from queries – a powerful way of discovering links posted on Twitter. site:domain limits results to links on the domain. For instance,  site:wikipedia.org shows the most popular wikipedia articles on Twitter, site:flickr.com shows the most popular photos posted on flickr.  site:amazon.com shows the most popular products.  site queries also include support the first path element, so site:wired.com/gadgets will show you all Wired stories about gadgets that are being linked on Twitter.

The from:user queries limit results to links posted by a user.  So from:YOURNICKNAME will show links posted by you.  Both from:user and site:domain can be combined with other queries of course and with each other.   Here’s a list of movies I’ve mentioned on twitter:  site:imdb.com from:vipulved

Enjoy.

We are excited to bring you the first major update to Topsy.

1. The right-time window

Topsy segments search results into time-windows – all time, month, week, day, hour.  Starting with this release, we automatically pick the most recent time window that contains a statistically significant top result.  The top result will be fresh and important in the consciousness of people posting on Twitter.  We call it the “right-time” window.  Try it by searching for “Barack Obama“.

2. Twitter profile search

Topsy now searches the user names, full names and mini bios  of Twitter users to find the top matching users for your query. The results are sorted by the retweet influence of the author so when you search for “shaq” – Topsy finds the “the_real_shaq“.  When you search for “Tim Ferriss” – Topsy finds the author’s active account “tferriss” rather than author’s inactive account “timferriss“. The best matching profile is always shown on the top-right of the search results page.  You can use this feature to discover the Twitter accounts of well-known people as well as those of close friends.  The Twitter profile search is also compatible with non-character based languages like Chinese and Japanese and is a precursor to full-fledged multilingual support.

3. Associated Authors on Trackback pages

Topsy maintains a Trackback page for every link posted on Twitter.  Here’s the Trackback page for Topsy’s launch story in Techcrunch.  The Trackback page now has a list of authors associated with the domain on which the page lives.  This list is made up of influential authors who include the domain (in this example, techcrunch.com) in their bio or as their webpage.  The list for techcrunch.com includes the Twitter profile for “Techcrunch” and the profiles of  the editors and contributors to techcrunch.  The associated authors features is a great way to discover the people behind any website.

4. Topsy Bubble – Tweet from Topsy

We’ve made the Topsy Bubble more functional and convenient.  It is now present next to all links on the search and author pages and shows the number of tweets the link has received. We’ve introduced a green tweet button that let’s you share the link with your followers.  The green button shortens the link title and URL to 140 limit so you don’t have to.

5. RT

We’ve also added the ability to retweet any tweet from the trackback page. Topsy computes reputation of authors based on the quantity and the quality of retweets they receive.  If you discover RT-worthy tweets, please RT them. Every RT increases the quality of Topsy results!

6. Top Authors are specific to Time Window

One of the most cited features on Topsy is the ability to discover Top Authors for any query.  This is the list of people who have tweeted about your query.  The Top Authors list is now specific to the time window.  When you view week window for “Real-Time Search” – the Top Authors list will include the most vocal authors about “Real Time Search” this week.

7. Improved User Interface

We’ve made some major changes to the UI to make it friendlier and more effective.  These changes are a result of feedback from you – our early adopters.  Special thanks to Matt Jones @fisherrider, Raj Misra, @raj_misra, Blake Cutler @bcutler, Christian Tom @cltom, Quinn Slack @sqs, Daryl Spitzer @yacitus, Christine Hironaka @c_hironaka, Anuraag Chigurupati @anuraagc, Snir Kodesh, Dean Young, Danny Belch, Ben Canning, Weston McBride and Josh Johnso – who participated in our UI testing sessions and volunteered their time and insights.

Enjoy, and don’t forget to RT this. 

Topsy is a new search engine, and is now open to the public!

The first search engines saw the Web as a collection of documents, and indexed and searched for keywords in those documents. They ranked results based on how well a document matched search terms. Google had a new approach, and saw the Web as a network of documents. Modern search engines rank results based not only on how well a document matches search terms, but also how much a document is cited by other documents.

Today, with the explosion of social platforms like Twitter, social networks and blogging communities, more and more links to interesting information originate from people, from the conversation streams within the social web. Topsy is designed to mine the collective signal from the social web in real-time. To measure the relative importance of each search result, Topsy examines the links being cited, the description of these links and the influence of each person citing a link. Topsy augments traditional search engines by finding interesting and relevant information that people are talking about. If other people are discussing it, Topsy thinks you might find it interesting and relevant too!

“Search powered by the social web” is a simple phrase, which hides many interesting problems. Topsy’s approach is an attempt at solving these problems with a range of new technologies – and initially, a dataset based exclusively on the conversations taking place in the wonderful Twitter community.

The social web is not a network of documents. It is conversation in a network of people. The social web generates a stream of citations of things – documents, videos, pictures, etc – that people are talking about. Searching through this stream of citations means separating the network of people from the things they discuss. Being able to do this is key to Topsy’s approach.

Identifying people as distinct from what they talk about allows Topsy to implement features such as Trackback pages – where you can see what people are saying about a particular web page. Or User pages, where you can see the links individual people have been talking about.

The conversations on the social web are not in the form of full web pages. They are much smaller. Tweets, or individual blog posts, or comments or reviews. They are mixed up – many people may be saying many things on the same web page. And they come in a continuously updating stream – freshness matters. Who is saying what, and when, is something that Topsy tries to capture. This allows Topsy to show search results based on conversations taking place in the past month, week, day or sometimes even hour.

Identifying authors also allows Topsy to compute the influence of individuals, and rank links in search results based on the influence of people talking about those links. Computing influence is not just a good way of finding relevant search results. It is essential to filter out spam, which is unfortunately a significant part of the social web. Our next post, on how Topsy computes influence, is the first of many occasional posts we’ll publish about our technology.

So – go try Topsy out! We look forward to your feedback – and you can even tweet comments or new links to us, or follow Topsy on Twitter.