You know the retweet button you see on content spread throughout the web? You can thank TweetMeme for that. Long before Twitter’s new Retweet functionality existed, this button was the way to share on Twitter. And it still is for content not on twitter.com. But now it’s time for TweetMeme to think about making money. And they’ve come up with a way that people are either going to love or hate.

At our Realtime CrunchUp in San Francisco today, TweetMeme founder Nick Halstead has unveiled AdTweets. As you might expect, this involves ads that appear on your site — but with the addition of a retweet button. Yes, you can also retweet these ads just as you would any piece of content.

We wrote that Twitturly filled a bit of a void when it was launched in April 2008 as a sort of Techmeme for all that gets linked on Twitter. Much of the initial excitement over its link tracking abilities ebbed away rather swiftly regardless, and competitors like Tweetmeme and Topsy have stolen much of Twitturly’s thunder since its launch.

Joel Strellner, who started the project, finally put Twitturly up for sale on Flippa ten days ago, and the auction just ended. Only five bids came in, and the sale ultimately netted no more than $8,500 – Strellner was hoping for double that amount.

Over the past few weeks, it’s definitely been crunchtime as we’ve been putting together the panels and demos for our Realtime CrunchUp on November 20 in San Francisco. Get your tickets here. After much back and forth, and with the help of our Realtime Board, we finally have an agenda we are very excited to present (see below).

Speakers will include Twitter COO Dick Costolo, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Facebook VP of Product Chris Cox, Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley, angel investor Ron Conway, FriendFeed co-founders (and now-Facebook VPs) Paul Buchheit and Bret Taylor. The CrunchUp will take place at the Intercontinental Hotel in San Francisco and will kick off with a big roundtable discussion and one-on-one interviews, followed by startup demos and panel discussions drilling down into geo streams, media streams, marketing, and venture capital.

Real time search and discovery engine Topsy is releasing a bunch of new products and tools this afternoon.

Topsy is all about the power of the ReTweet on Twitter. When the service first launched publicly in May we noted that ReTweets are the new currency of the web. And it isn’t just the number of retweets that matters (which is subject to large scale spamming efforts). It’s the authority of the people doing the retweeting, too.

One way Topsy is distinguishing itself from competitors like OneRiot and TweetMeme is by holding on to data forever. Most real time search engines are focused on right now, which is exactly what people want. But they dump data periodically, and anyone looking for older stuff won’t be able to find it. Here’s a sample search for “skype andreessen” on OneRiot (4 resutls), TweetMeme (0 results) and Topsy (37 pages of results, which can be sorted and filtered by time). So when you want to look up old Tweets around a link, Topsy has the data that no one else is currently showing.

There is a lot of chatter about TweetMeme’s rather robust growth to over 18 million unique monthly visitors on Compete.com. That puts them ahead of well known sites like LinkedIn and gmail.com with 15 million and 9 million visitors, respectively, on the service). In fact, Tweetmeme currently sits as the 68th largest site on the Internet, according to Compete.

What does TweetMeme do? They offer other sites a “retweet” button that makes it easy for readers to send story links to Twitter. We use it on all our sites, you can see it on the top right of this post. They also have analytics around tweets sent via the service, and a home page that shows the most retweeted Tweets at any given time. It competes with Digg, TechMeme, Google News and other news aggregators to show breaking news.

But is TweetMeme really so big? The short answer is no.

TweetMixx, the newly launched service from social voting site Mixx that allows you to find relevant links on Twitter, is venturing into new territory today with the launch of TweetMixx Channels. The service basically lets brands, celebs and companies consolidate their Twitter traffic and mentions on one page.

TweetMixx Channels features branded, customizable pages, with the brand’s current Twitter feed, tweets and updates from fans, and links relevant to content about the brand, company or topic posted automatically. The tool also serves as a tracking and monitoring tool for mentions and conversations about a brand taking place on Twitter.

As Twitter grows, with an estimated 50 million+ live accounts, it is increasingly becoming an important source of traffic for many Websites. But getting a handle on how much traffic it is actually delivering, where it is coming from, and the viral nature of that traffic is a real challenge. Today, “social media experts” everywhere can rejoice because Tweetmeme is launching Tweetmeme Analytics, which offers a full dashboard showing how many times a link has been tweeted, retweeted, and clicked on by which Twitter users, in what cities, and from which referring sites and URL shorteners.

Tweetmeme already tracks a lot of this data for the most retweeted links, which is what it uses to determine the hottest stories on Twitter. It also gets a lot of data from its retweet buttons, which are popular on blogs like ours (see above, and click it!).

Just last night we were talking about the speed at which information is shared on the web, primarily through Twitter and Facebook. The default options for both of those services make you go to another page to do your sharing. A new service, TwittLink, wants to bring Twitter sharing to your page by way of a widget.

Basically, this is just a lightweight widget that a website owner installs via a simple line of JavaScript (or a slightly longer script with customizable parameters). You will then see a TwittLink tab on the left hand side of your page, not unlike the feedback tabs that companies like Get Satisfaction offer. Clicking on this tab pops open a full Twitter client. Once you authenticate yourself via OAuth, you can then tweet from here, see your followers updates, see tweets about that particular site, and see tweets sent from the TwittLink tab on that particular site.

Never underestimate the power of two-way sync and large social networks. A week ago, MySpace turned on two-way sync with Twitter, allowing members to post their status updates to Twitter directly from MySpace. Those updates appear in Twitter with a short link back to MySpace, using MySpace’s own link shortener, “http://lnk.ms/.”

MySpace status updates are now flooding Twitter. Those MySpace short links account for 17 percent of all passed links on Twitter, according to Tweetmeme, making it the No. 2 link shortener after bit.ly, which rules with 68 percent. The day of the launch, lnk.ms accounted for 8.56 percent of all passed links on Twitter. MySpace has had its own short URL for about six months, but it’s only now taking off with two-way sync.

Back in July, we wrote about TweetMixx, the new service from social voting site Mixx that allows you find relevant links on Twitter. Starting tomorrow, the service will be opened up to the public. And in anticipation of that, the service got a last-minute revamp this weekend to make sure it’s ready.The results are good, but there’s still a question of if TweetMixx can take off in an increasingly crowded field.

As we noted previously, once you log-in with your Twitter credentials via OAuth, the service scans the tweets of the people you follow for links. Rather than trying to make you decipher a long URL or worse, a short URL, to know what the content is, TweetMixx pulls out the title, to let you know what you’re going to click on in plain English (or whatever language the link is in). You can also easily retweet any item or see that link’s details on Mixx.com in this main TweetMixx stream.

TweetMeme, the quickly-growing site that lists the most popular links on Twitter, is launching an overhauled version today that the startup is calling TweetMeme V2. The company says that today’s release includes “a total rewrite” of its scoring system, which will likely affect how quickly and what type of stories appear on the site.

Given that the site isn’t live yet we can’t test the new engine, but TweetMeme says that the new ranking engine will provide “more varied and better quality content”, which will be helped in part by a new kudos scoring system that can change the weight of individual Twitter users. The site is also introducing an improved filtering engine, a new comment system (you’ll now be able to take a comment on the site and retweet it), and a flagging system that lets users bury bad entries. A more robust analytics package will also be appearing next week.

As if we needed yet another URL shortening service, TweetMeme is today debuting ReTwt.me in an effort to make that particular saturated field even more so. And it’s not like it does anything special in comparison with the plethora of similar services out there.

It shrinks longer links in order to make them more tweetable (and retweetable), it gives you some options to share links from its main website, throws in some analytics so you can see just how few people actually click those links you’re spreading and comes with an API.

The only slight advantage it could have over competitors like TinyURL and bit.ly is a tight integration with the TweetMeme service / button, but they won’t be exploiting that connection and keep on supporting the URL shortening services as they were before (which is obviously the right thing to do).

If you look at the top right hand corner of any blog post on TechCrunch, you will see both the number of comments on it and the number of times it’s been retweeted (linked to and passed around on Twitter). Usually the retweet number is bigger than the number of comments because it is much easier to do. It counts as a vote for that post inasmuch as a passed link can be construed as a reader recommendation. Everyone who retweets a link is in effect recommending it to all of their followers, and it can help to drive traffic back to the original post. At least that is the theory.

But how many retweet buttons are actually out there and how many people click on them? When it comes to the spread of the buttons themselves, TweetMeme offered some stats today showing that its retweet buttons are now getting 1.6 billion impressions a month. That number has quadrupled in the past two months alone. New retweet market entrants have a lot of catching up to do. And Just wait until retweet buttons start appearing on individual comments as well.

What that means, however, is just that the buttons are appearing on blog posts and articles which collectively are viewed 1.6 billion times a month, not that they are clicked on that many times. I asked Tweetmeme founder Nick Halstead how many actual retweets do those buttons produce. He doesn’t have exact numbers for that yet, but his best guesstimate is 200,000 a day, or 6 million a month. That translates into a paltry 0.375 percent click-through rate.

You might think that those green “retweet” buttons you see across the web (including on this site) are controlled by Twitter, but they’re actually the key component to TweetMeme, the tweeted link aggregator. And now that key component is under attack by the new service ReTweet.com.

ReTweet.com, which launched this week looking shockingly similar to TweetMeme, now has a contest that will reward $10,000 to a blogger that installs their retweet button on their site. While they don’t explicitly call out TweetMeme’s button, they do have this very blurb featured prominently on the site: “Add the Real Retweet Button to Your Website!”, which of course implies that the TweetMeme retweet button is not the real one.

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).

ReTweet.com, a TweetMeme challenger put together by Mesiab Labs (the startup behind notorious Twitter spam software program Hummingbird), has made its online debut after teasing the Twitterati with an announcement and landing page a couple of weeks ago.

You may remember that immediately after ReTweet.com coming out of the woodworks, TweetMeme was already threatening Mesiab Labs with a lawsuit over the latter’s flat out copying of its retweet button code and website design. Both startups aim to become the king of retweets, an increasingly popular activity on the increasingly popular Twitter service, and they’re clearly not competing on friendly terms.

It hasn’t even been 24 hours since we wrote about the impending launch of TweetMeme competitor ReTweet, and already TweetMeme founder Nick Halstead is threatening ReTweet with a lawsuit. He takes being king of retweets very seriously.

It is not so much the apparent flat-out copying of TweetMeme’s Website design (ReTweet has not even launched in private beta yet), that bothers him. After all, TweetMeme itself was highly “inspired” by another news aggregator, Techmeme. What bugs him is what he claims to be almost exact copying of code. Halstead writes on the TweetMeme blog:

Those little green reweet buttons you see across the web on sites like this one have helped TweetMeme rise in popularity. The buttons are now so ubiquitous that the service has seemingly become the de-facto retweeting mechanism for content on the web. But it looks like it’s about to get a challenger, with a killer name, Retweet.com.

Retweet.com currently only has a a landing page saying that it’s “coming soon,” so it’s hard to know exactly what it is from that. But there are plenty of clues around the web pointing to it being a TweetMeme competitor. The main hint comes from a design contest taking place at 99designs. The prize is over $1,000 to design the site, and all of the mockups look very similar to TweetMeme (which, to be fair, takes a lot of its look from sites like Digg).

There’s a cliché statement about entrepreneurship that says ideas are nothing without execution, rendering the former virtually worthless without the combination of hard work and luck that can transform unmaterialized concepts into viable businesses. Some have described ideas to be a mere multiplier of execution, which is close to how I personally think about them, and I would add that the process of getting a great product out there is a vital part of what constitutes innovation in the first place.

In my view, it’s not that ideas are worthless per se, it’s that they’re never more than a starting point, a launchpad.

I’ve been thinking about this all day after I read this blog post by Marjolein Hoekstra (who I consider to be a friend) about the original idea for Tweetmeme, a service that aggregates the most discussed and retweeted stories on Twitter (we use their retweet button at the bottom of blog posts, and you should use it).

One of the most effective ways to amplify your message on Twitter is to get your followers to retweet it to their followers. Retweeting is also becoming a popular way to pass links around Twitter. They are becoming the new currency of the Web because of the power of passed links. One service in particular, Tweetmeme, is cornering the market on retweets by making it easy for blogs and other sites to add a retweet button to every page. You can see one at the bottom of this post. Just click on it, and it will take you to your Twitter account and populate a message with a “RT,” the headline, and a short link. Go ahead, do it now. Do it again. Okay, thanks.

Lots of sites use Tweetmeme’s retweet button, and it drives a lot of its overall traffic. Nick Halstead, the CEO of Fav.or.it (Tweetmeme’s parent company) says that the buttons are so widespread right now that they are generating 196 million impressions a week month. In other words, that is how many pages load with the buttons every month week, and some portion of those result in actual retweets. Halstead is making some improvements to the retweet buttons. Before each retweet generated by the button would include a promotional “via @tweetmeme.” That has now removed to make more room for the actual headline and link. Next week he is going to introduce an image button which can be included in RSS feeds and emails to spread the retweet love even further. And sites will be able to embed a retweet counter to show how many overall retweets they get every week.