Tweetmeme is on a tear. According to Compete, the Twitter-centric link tracker went from nowhere in February, 2009 (with 26,000 unique visitors) to more than tenfold increase in March (to 385,000 uniques). Nick Halstead, The CEO of UK-based Fav.or.it, the company behind Tweetmeme, tells me he is tracking closer to 200,000 uniques a month based on yesterday’s visitors, but that he is adding 50 percent a week. Tweetmeme seems to be pulling way ahead of the other Twitter link sites such as Twitturly or Twit Links. Any way you slice it, Tweetmeme is doing something right.
The site shows the most popular links on Twitter ranked by a combination of the number times the link has been Tweeted (shown as a big number beside each headline), recentness, and momentum of Tweets. It also categorizes different news stories based on the title of the post or article, the underlying domain, and hash tags within the Tweets. You can sort by Comedy, Entertainment, Gaming, Lifestyle, Science, Sports, Technology, or World & Business. You can also sort by news, Images, or videos. It pulls together 200,000 links, images, and videos every day now. And you can follow what is makes it on Tweetmeme’s homepage via Twitter itself by following the @Tweetmeme account or sub-accounts for each channel such as @tm-technology or @tm_comedy.
Today, it added OAuth, which lets you sign in with your Twitter account and retweet headlines without leaving the page. It also launched a toolbar, which will be controversial because it opens up the underlying link within a Tweetmeme URL and frame much like the Diggbar does. Instead of showing how many times the story has been Dugg, the frame shows a count of how many times the story has been Tweeted along with a “Shuffle” button (equivalent to the Diggbar’s “Random” button) that will take you to another highly Tweeted story.
I am not a big fan of the toolbar in principle, but I can see why Halstead added it. It keeps people on Tweetmeme and drives more activity. At least, it can be easily closed. But with every site adding its own frames these days, pretty soon there won’t be any room left for the actual destination site you are trying to look at.
What I am a big fan of, though, is that after a recent relaunch, it just keeps adding features. A few weeks ago it added a “live” tab which shows the most Tweeted links stream onto the page much like FriendFeed now handles your personal activity stream. Thankfully, you can set it to stream only stories that have been Tweeted at least 5, 10, or 20 times. Even setting it to 5 links is unreadable because the stream moves down too fast, but at 10 or 20 its becomes more manageable and addictive in that you can watch the most popular links in the Twittersphere stream by in real time.
This live stream of relevant headlines is much more immediate even than what you find on Techmeme, which can take hours to change meaningfully. With so many sites gunning for Techmeme’s crown as the ultimate arbiter of what news is being talked about the most on the Web (I wrote about one such attempt earlier today), the real threat is going to come from somebody like Tweetmeme, which plays to different strengths. The question is whether Twitter will be a better place to mine for buzz than blogs, news sites, or the rest of the Web.
Right now, I’d say the answer is no. Not because Tweetmeme doesn’t surface the most Tweeted stories, but because everyone on Twitter seems to be obsessed with linking to stories about Twitter! For instance, right now 6 of the top ten headlines on Tweetmeme are about Twitter acquisition rumors. To be fair, that was also the top story on Techmeme for most of the day. But at least Techmeme has moved on (to Kindle rumors!). Will the stories on Tweetmeme ever become more relevant and timely than on Techmeme? If I were Gabe Rivera, I’d start worrying now.
Six Twitter stories on TechCrunch today. Shark, you have been jumped.
Do we get to see Erick in a leather jacket and two thumbs up?
hehe everyone’s going twitter crazy
why twitter is getting so popular?
i created acc on switter two weeks ago just to see what it is, and let me tell in my opinion is crap, what you suppose to do there post msg, how is that fun?
Or is there something else to twitter that i don’t know about…
boos helps me get down the stairs with style
http://www.epic.../load/8-1-0-309
Erick, I love ya but goddam use a spell checker!
What is misspelled?
tehmeme instead of techmeme
“To be fair, that was also the top story on Tehmeme for most of the day. But at least Techmeme has moved on (to Kindle rumors!).”
I like http://www.boilingpage.com more than tweetmeme. It is not biased towards stories about twitter, but quite widespread. May be their algorithms are different.
Glad that you like http://www.boilingpage.com. I know the founders of this company very well. They are a bunch of smart guys trying to create a really smart real-time search engine. Personally, I feel that their technology is far ahead of any of their competitors including tweetmeme. They mask the similar stories, their ranking algorithms are different, they have personalized recommendations etc. You can see their home page and compare it for yourself. Apple-Twitter rumour is on the top of the list, but just two entries of that .. and the results are quite diversified. Am not trying to evangelize their service, but honestly, I like their engine over other engines.
How can I not ‘like’ a headline like that
All those uniques are for the TweetMeme button that’s popped up on a bunch of sites. Everybody here has probably loaded the .js for the button dozen of times. Those uniques have nothing to do with visitors to the actual TweetMeme site.
Erick has been fooled. Wasn’t hard, eh?
http://trends.g...me.com&sa=N
Come on TC, one day you’ll manage to get things wrong by less than 100x
(by the way quantcast reports the same numbers as google)
Tweetmeme is so small that none of these estimates are going to be right on an absolute basis. Compete over estimates, in fact, as I mention in the post. The point is the trend, and they all show a major boost over the past month or so and it doesn’t have anything to do with the buttons.
Nick: congrats!
I think you should rename your site TwitterCrunch — or just Twits for short — because of your infatuation with this social media du jour. Seriously, how many articles a day can you write about Twitter?
Except this article is about Tweetmeme. By your logic, we shouldn’t write about any company trying to build a business around Twitter.
HobbyCrunch makes more sense.
dude, you forgot your shameless plug of your useless “locator.com” crap.
Erick has not been tricked, I actually told him our stats were lower than the compete graph (if you read the article) – but they are growing 50% every week, as is the button – which we server 12 million buttons per day, (certainly not a handful!)
I think everything should involve twitter. Including sex and breathing.
TwitterCrunch is on to something. We should rename earth to Twearth.
Its way more than a irc 2.0 people. Twitter is a revolution. It’s the best tech since the wheel.
Soon Twitter will topple Google and and Microsoft with TwitterOS and TwitterSearch. Then Facebook with tweetbook.
CAN’T WAIT FOR THE MILLION MORE TWITTER ARTICLES TO COME!!!
Now we just need a URL shortening service to Get 50 Million in funding (aka SLIDE for FB). This will get interesting.
hopefully they have a business model.
ModelsLocator.com – business is fashionable
omfglocator.com — pull your lower lip over your head and swallow yourself
4/9 rss posts on my reader are twitter related. That’s 45%!
This is a bit much now. Tech crunch news is quickly becoming less of a favourite for me.
Wow! What else is going on with Twitter?! And what will happen with Twitter tomorrow! Twitter twitter twitter twitter.
I agree with the fact that TC is way Twitter heavy. You (TC) hide behind the shield of “we’re reporting what is hott in technology, which is Twitter”, when in fact I think you take great pride in the fact that, knowing you have a solid audience – coupled with the million Twitter posts – you had a large influence on them becoming popular. Just don’t go all Al Gore on us in 30 years and claim you invented Twitter. You just had a huge hand in their success.
Heck, post my site five times a day and I’m sure it will get big too
What’s interesting is how many times Twitter was down – and the fact that it was relatively acceptable.
Eh, big whoop. Let them niche themselves. It’s not like they don’t have a dog in the Twitter fight.
A serious competitor for Tweetmeme is http://www.twittlink.com
No its not. I had to remove all the %20’s from my tweet when I clicked your retweet link. And I see no button, and the design is decidedly Web 1.5 and difficult to read.
I just checked out tweetmeme from the first time. The second link I tried was a YouTube link- and I received this message from YouTube:
“Sorry for the interruption. We have been receiving a large volume of requests from your network. To continue with your YouTube experience, please enter the verification code below.”
Is this because of their toolbar? If so, that’s just another reason I’m not a fan of these new toolbars.
The toolbars are a dicey strategy, especially as sites start to block them. I’d get rid of the toolbar.
No, this isn’t the toolbar causing this. The actual link that has been tweeted for this is a direct link to the YouTube captcha page, which causes it to get displayed every time.
People really need to verify URLs are correct and contain no extra information before (re)tweeting them!
This is a recent YouTube wall, and I’ve seen it happen on FB as well. YT is mucking around with something, somewhere.
Sweeeet!
Tweetmeme is pretty impressive for sure!
I’m not sure it can pose a risk to techmeme like the article says though. Truth is many of the links most tweeted are (imho) stupid.
Shush you, angry man, ok? Don’t rain on my twitter dream parade, ok? I want my twitter stock to reach the ceiling before it all crashes down, ok? If people listen to you, I will have to punch you in the face. Such is the word of Sanjay.
Interesting that, in the tweetmeme screenshot, the Gawker article appears twice. Shows you that, while the service is still not polished, it’s still managing to gain a ton of traction.
High school physics teaches us that velocity is not the same as traction.
Wow this site is pretty awesome. I had heard about it before but never had the time to check it out. I like it!
Although, i HATE toolbars. Make them go away!!!!!
Yeah, Tweetmeme is getting better.
I do like this Twitter-link aggregator better, though : MicroPlaza.com because (once you’re OAuthenticated), it bases the ranking on *your* network.
So depending on who you’re following, you will get a list of tweets that are relevant to *you*, not the average Joe.
That graph at the top is basically Mashable traffic. Mashable put Tweetmeme’s retweet button on their blog, and so the embed code sends Mashable visitors to Tweetmeme, inflating Tweetmeme’s stats.
Tweetmeme may already be worth $500 million based on it’s huge growth, market dominance, and potential. There is no recession with web 2.0 and the Silicon Valley. people need to stop complaining and buy stocks http://iamned.com/blog/
How do i get SolarFeeds featured on techcrunch? its the seeking alpha of solar…as for techmeme, once i slapped that “retweet” button on my articles, traffic is way up…so they help the little guy too…
There is nothing to stop Gabe adding retweets to his algorithm – he probably should as they’re just links right, which has always been the juice that drives techmeme.
There’s more to Techmeme than simply surfacing stories to the front, like its clustering which allows you to follow the conversation. I’d suggest Tweetmeme has a way to go…
You can also configure to show Tweetmeme Button on selected wordPress posts
http://www.quic...ordpress-posts/
why is their conversion rate so pathetic?
http://twitter....find_on_twitter
Twitlinks link is going to twitturly