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!