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.
Let me be realistic here, because I don’t understand entirely what you’re trying to say.
People retweet because they want to help promote a message and help it spread.
Why would you retweet a comment? You don’t want to read what other people’s opinions are, and for commenting, it’s especially lame.
No way to say it, but TweetMeMe think they’re all power. This has got to be their lamest move in history.
Retweeting comments is just going to increase the traffic. It won’t workout.
This will be great. How often have we all read great comments…even cut/paste them into a tweet? Sometimes the comments are even better than the story, or at least more entertaining. I like the community voting aspect which should help those people that might comment on articles a bit later in the day get a chance to rise up the ranks. Go tweetmeme.com
It is, if comments are valued by quality and gets reordered accordingly, then its going to be a treat for Twitter users. It would help to have healthy discussions.
You already can do all these with http://urljar.com bookmarklet, see their youtube demo http://utb.im/RwK for twittering with no 140 limit and with one for many URLs…
Gahhh, isn’t Twitter noisy enough already?
My thoughts exactly.
Mine too. Make it stop…
+1 on the noise.. would it be useful to retweet this comment?
Sounds like js-kit.com is trying to do this kind of thing too.
Would be neat to incorporate tweets & RTs back on the blog post (like a pingback maybe?). I haven’t seen this two-way conversation yet, only the one-way blog/comment->twitter.
CG
http://greacen.com
http://twitter.com/greacen
Twitter Blog is a WP plugin that does this *mostly*.
I really don’t think they look so similar. I think you are trying to spin the story.
Interesting move, but I could see it getting messy on sites that aren’t tweetmeme (although I’m sure that is part of the goal).
Looks like a cool and useful tool ! Interested to see how users adapt to it and use this feature. It would be cool if Lazyfeed was able to integrate something like this into their system http://www.trig...le.php?id=72770
here’s a comment to retweet = lame
Pluck just recently announced the same thing. Their new Twitter feature is already live at SFGate.com and will be on many other sites soon.
Great idea. I have said for over a year that twitter is actually BECOMING the blog commenting system.
People might not feel compelled to actually comment ON the blog due to the login process, etc. BUT they will add their thoughts when they RT or when they just share a link to a blog post.
Any time you can remove friction points in the communication process it is a good thing.
Cheers!
The same rule still applies:
“Meme” in your company name = FAIL
Very useful tool!
This will come in handy when i have to argue with someone about the comment they make