What If Comments Could Be Retweeted? TweetMeme Is Working On It.

Twitter and blogs are increasingly feeding into each other. A blog post can go viral if it gets retweeted enough time. But what if it was easy to retweet a comment? TweetMeme, which powers the retweet buttons increasingly found on blog posts (like this one), is working on bringing retweets to comments, at least to comments on its own site. But once it does that, blogs will be able to implement the system using TweetMeme’s APIs.

In a post on the TweetMeme blog, founder Nick Halstead gives a preview of the commenting system he is getting ready to release On TweetMeme itself in the next few weeks. (The announcement comes on the same day that competitor Retweet is launching, and is a bit of a preemptive move to try to announce something better).

Right now, headlines on TweetMeme such as this one show recent Tweets linking to the story. TweetMeme will be adding a commenting feature there as well. The goals of the system are:

1. Promotion of quality comments
2. Works seamlessly with Twitter
3. Reply mechanism that feels familiar to Twitter users
4. Ability to embed media into comments

Each comment will have its own retweet button, and visitors will be able to reorder comments by most retweeted first. In effect, it becomes a voting system for comments with each retweet acting as a vote (and you can only vote once). You can reply to a specific commenter both within comments and on Twitter simultaneously. Another nice feature is that short links get elongated back to the original in the comments, and if the link is to a photo or other media, you see a thumbnail image in the comment itself.

While TweetMeme is doing this for itself, the functionality will be available through its APIs (the documentation is not there yet though). I’d love to see this implemented as a blog commenting system where each comment could be retweeted and comments can be reordered by the resulting votes.