Techmeme launched in 2005 and Danny Sullivan immediately mentioned that “there’s no keyword search facility that I can see. I want that, and soon!”  Gabe Rivera and his team toiled over the last 32 months to ensure that Techmeme has a way to search for posts. 

Search wasn’t always the highest priority for Techmeme.  Becoming a mainstream, newsworthy site was the highest priority.  But now that search is available, here is a list of common uses.

For companies that aggregate data like Crunchbase, search queries can be used to embed data relating to specific keywords.  For example, Crunchbase lists aggregated Techmeme data for the companies in their database.  Click the thumbnail below to see a sample of how the data is used:

Techmeme Search shows headlines that appeared on the homepage in a reverse chronological.  Headlines that appear in discussion are excluded.  Rivera pointed out that search services like Ask Blog Search, Google News, and Topix of returning everything that they have indexed.  This is what makes Techmeme search unique.  It only returns noteworthy results, not exhaustive data.

While there is a search box at the top of the Techmeme homepage, a more barebones search is available at techmeme.com/search.  Techmeme visitors can filter results based on data in the title only or within the summary text of individual stories.

Omer Horvitz, Techmeme’s first hire designed the search.

Review of New Techmeme Feature:
For media researchers such as myself that depends heavily on Techmeme, it is important for me to be able to filter out information about the companies that I am interested in.  Since Techmeme has been capturing the best technology news stories over the last 3 years, this is the best way to get that information at a rapid pace.

The functionality is simple, yet effective.  After entering search keyword(s), navigating around the site is simple enough.  There are numbers at the bottom that indicate how far back or forward you want to find your results based on the time stories appeared on the homepage.

I highly recommend those that haven’t used Techmeme before to get into it now.  Especially now that search has been added.

Techmeme is the most on target site for finding the best aggregated technology news.  Techmeme finds a new stories that becomes instantly popular and attaches related links to that story.  However, when subscribing to Techmeme’s RSS feed, the related links become excluded and only the main headlines make it.  That is up until Techmeme introduced Firehose. 

Firehose accounts for related discussion stories to the main headlines.  This is beneficial for the publishers that get in late, but can be overwhelming for the reader.

Techmeme introduced this feature for all their sites: Techmeme, WeSmirch (celebrity), ballbug (baseball–How about that Roger Clemens?), and memeorandum (political). 

Techmeme also created a Twitter account where top headlines will be added.  The Techmeme Firehose RSS feed is available at: http://www.techmeme.com/firehose.xml.

[Information Source: Somewhat Frank]

“Starting with tonight’s push, any API calls that return information about users’ status messages, including FQL and users.getInfo, will be changing slightly. The return value will now start with a verb, so prepending “is ” is no longer required. So in order to construct a full status message it is now $name + ‘ ‘ + $message, instead of $name + ‘ is ‘ + $message. Additionally, users.setStatus will be able to avoid prepending the word “is ” by passing in an additional parameter: “status_includes_verb”. If you pass in true for that parameter, it signals to us that we should *not* prepend the word “is ” to the status you give us. In a few, we will delete that parameter and change the default behavior to be that you must include your own verb.”
-Facebook platform status feed

Users on Facebook are encouraged to write what they were doing in status messages just like Twitter.  But every message had to start with “[your first name] is” and then a custom message.  But no longer will that “is” be there according to Wired and AllFacebook.

So now instead of messages like “Amit is wondering if Bill Gates will poke him back on Facebook” can be replaced by “Amit wants Bill Gates to poke him back on Facebook.”  I think that after Facebook removes it, users will wonder “what really was the point of that is being mandatory.”  And just for the record, I agree with Arrington when I say that because this is a top story on Techmeme, the Blogosphere really does need a vacation.

Techmeme, a technology news aggregator website officially launched their Leaderboard feature today.  Upon unleashing the Leaderboard application to the Internet community, there was some welcoming and there was some criticism.  I did a little bit of criticizing on TechCrunch, but on Pulse 2.0, I will give it some welcoming.

My biggest criticism of Techmeme is that content that is aggregated on the homepage is chosen manually by a panel of technology experts.  But manually content selection seems to many Web 2.0 sites out there such as Digg, Techmeme, Reddit, etc.  Digg and Reddit homepages are basically controlled by the most active users on the site.  To my understanding, stories on Techmeme is selected by unnamed sources.

All things considered, Techmeme representatives actually do a really good job at recognizing what discussions are worthwhile.  I hope to see Pulse 2.0 grow up on this list eventually even if it takes writing several posts per day everyday for years.  Things happen on the Internet at a rapid pace everyday.  And Techmeme captures that information and reports it right away.  This is why I have Techmeme on my Netvibes.

Techmeme helps sites like Pulse 2.0, TechCrunch, GigaOm, Engadget, etc. running.  Those at the top have something to be proud off and those at the bottom have something to aspire to.  Game on.

Pete Cashmore has been on a roll lately. Aside from the new user interface for Mashable, Pete has introduced Mashcodes, a website dedicated to widgets and games for MySpace, Friendster, Piczo, Xanga, and hi5 implementation. Now Cashmore has taken the idea of Techmeme and TailRank (discussion tracking and consolidation) and integrated the software into his blog. The idea is called Mashtracker.

The way that Mashtracker works is by taking discussions from all over the web that relate to articles published by Mashable and adds the discussions on other websites below. Some of the websites that have common discussions with Mashable posts, thus appear on Mashtracker includes Pulse 2.0 and TechCrunch. This software was developed in parternship with Megite.