Tweetmeme Launches The Second Real-Time Tweet Link Search — This Hour

picture-25Tweetmeme, a service which tracks the most retweeted messages, has been growing fast and getting a lot of buzz as the best way to discover hot items on Twitter. So naturally, they want to get into the search game as well. But simple tweet search, others like Scoopler and Twitter itself have covered, so the decision was apparently made to get into the new buzzworthy Twitter search game: Content search.

Yes, the second company within the last hour has launched a Twitter link search engine. Tweetmeme’s launch follows shortly after OneRiot’s offering which launched this morning. And both follow news last week that Twitter itself is working on the same feature. As an outsider, it would appear that a few of these companies are tripping over themselves to do this real-time content search before Twitter gets into the game — or worse, Google (which is also having its own search event today). But both claim to have been working on this for a while.

So how does Tweetmeme search stack up? Well, as far as I can tell this morning, both OneRiot and Tweetmeme are having launch issues. Certain functionality doesn’t work on either, so it’s hard to do a proper test. But as best I can tell, the two are slightly different. Tweetmeme seems to be more interested in relevancy of the links being tweeted out (something which it has always been good at thanks to its retweet data), while OneRiot is more apt at content coming in real-time. Tweetmeme does have an “Age” sorting feature, but it doesn’t auto-update the way OneRiot’s does.

But Tweetmeme claims it indexes videos and images as well, while OneRiot offers the indexing of Digg links on top of Twitter links. Tweetmeme founder Nick Halstead claims Tweetmeme is indexing over 15 million links right now, while OneRiot general manager Tobias Peggs tells me they’re indexing over 2 and a half billion links. If you look in the comments of our earlier story, you can see the two of them playfully sparring with one another over their respective offerings. I think we’ll let the two duke it out for a while and get their search offerings in order a bit more before we declare a winner here.

The only thing that is abundantly clear is real-time search of content using a social layer is hot as hell right now. Everyone appears to be trying to stake their claim and yell “FIRST!” I don’t care about “first,” give me “best.”

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