Smesh and The Guardian have partnered to develop the GuardianTagbot, aka ‘tagbot’, a Twitter-based gateway into the Guardian’s content API.

For Twitter users, the tagbot is a handy shortcut into the Guardian’s rich content ecosystem — just tweet some keywords or a phrase @GuardianTagbot, and you’ll receive a mobile-friendly link into relevant Guardian content. It also helps the Guardian  investigate new content services for users, as well as a new way to show potential commercial clients just what its API can do.

The initial launch was a wee bit too successful — some high-profile tweets (hi @charlesarthur!) mentioning the service saw a sudden surge of queries mere minutes after launch. Twitter, vigilant against spam-related automated services, saw the sudden flurry of automated replies and responded in a manner temporarily harmful to our well-intentioned and helpful ‘bot. Tagbot will be up and running again soon!

We’ll also tell you a bit more about how the tagbot service works in another post.

Please also look at the Guardian’s FAQs on the beta, by visiting www.guardian.co.uk/tagbot.

Update at 18.20: tagbot is awake once more!

Update: Nieman lab have nice write-up on the tagbot, including some details from us on how it works.