On the SmashinGeeks.com site there's a recent post showing you how to make a simple request and get the number of retweets for a post using PHP and Tweetmeme/Backtype.

Tweeting is what we do after publishing posts. To place some minimal text that jumps upon the Tweet on Twitter will be more great instead of using a tweet button. Its made possible to count the number of tweets using PHP only, however if you want to sizzle it up, then its your way.

They include code examples of how to connect to each of the services and make a request for a query string to their API using libraries provided by the service.

On the WhyJoomla.com site today Qasim Virjee has a quick tutorial showing how to add in a module to your Joomla site that talks to the Tweetmeme website with just a small bit of code.

When you take a peek at the tweetmeme page containing the necessary embed code it may not be too easy to tell how to use it with your Joomla site - and though there's a couple of plugins/extension floating around Joomla, it may not offer the flexibility you require for clean theming/templating. However, there's an easy way to go about embedding this and all it takes is a small modification of the de facto embed code.

It really just boils down to about five lines of Javascript that can be customized to pull just the information you want (like article templates or article lists). Then it's just a simple matter of dropping it into your template and adding it to the site.

Nick Halstead has pointed out a website, written in PHP he's created to help make a little bit of sense out of the links that go flying past in your twitter client - tweetmeme.

What is it? It tracks the public timeline from twitter and picks up any links that get posted. It then follows each link to find final destination and then categorizes the content into blogs / video / images / audio. This project really shows what is possible using PHP if you know what you are doing.

Most of the work was done by another developer, Stuart Dallas as one of four that worked on the project together. It's written in PHP5 and uses only about 20 PHP files to get the job done. You can also check out the launch post over on tweetmeme's blog for more information on the service.