The last time I was in the Valley I spent a decent 90 minutes catching up with Techmeme’s Gabe Rivera on Michael’s lounge (sorry, couch). As I do every time I catch up with Gabe, I endeavored to get him to spill the secrets of Techmeme’s algorithm, then shortly there after I offered him money to license the script (having failed on three previous attempts to get someone on Scriptlance to design me a clone). As usual I failed on both accounts, but there was a third request and Gabe was listening.
Like many I’m addicted to Techmeme and more recently Twitter, and to date Techmeme + Twitter hasn’t met my expectations. Techmeme’s feed, which is then fed into Twitter, only offers “important” stories, and hence the only way to see breaking stories on Techmeme has been to visit the page itself and constantly refresh it. As of today, Gabe is now offering “Firehose” feeds that provide any story attaining headline status on Techmeme (which excludes “Discussion” links) within 5 minutes, either by RSS and/ or Twitter. RSS feed here and Twitter account here.
The down side is that the page view number for Techmeme is about to take a hit, but conversely Techmeme fans will welcome this additional functionality. Thanks Gabe.