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.

One of the hottest areas of search right now is real time search, which attempts to find results based on what is happening right now. Twitter’s search engine fast becoming one of the key ways to navigate the service and discover what people are thinking about any subject at any given moment. Facebook is testing out ways to let you search your personal stream. Google is waking up to the challenge as well (Larry Page is particularly concerned with keeping up).

Every week, it seems, a new startup launches tackling real time search from a different angle. (Collecta, One Riot, Scoopler, Topsy, Almost.at, Tweetmeme, CrowdEye, Omgili, to name a few).. They are trying to apply real time search to all the different streams of information flowing over the Internet right now: Twitter, Facebook feeds, Digg submissions, blog comments, RSS feeds, Flickr photos, YouTube uploads, shared links on bit.ly and elsewhere. The list keeps getting longer every day.

There is something about human nature which makes us want to prioritize information by how recent it is, and that is the fundamental appeal of real time search. The difference between real time search and regular search didn’t really crystallize for me until I had a conversation with Edo Segal, who sold his real time search company Relegence to AOL a few years ago and holds three patents on the subject. “Real time taps into consciousness,” says Segal, “search taps into memory. That is why it so potent. You experience the world in real time.”

Apparently, TweetMeme is getting big enough that it can have its own “20%” projects, like Google does. That’s how TweetTabs was born, a great new way to search Twitter in real-time.

True to its name, TweetTabs allows you to open several tabs with different Twitter search queries. While some Twitter desktop clients also allow you to do this, TweetTabs is completely browser-based. And it’s great because it’s so simple. All you do is enter a query into the search box and a new tab will automatically pop open that will update in real-time. There are also a list of the top trending topics on Twitter across the top of the site, which you can click on to open a tab for any of those searches as well.

Once again, the Internet is shifting before our eyes. Information is increasingly being distributed and presented in real-time streams instead of dedicated Web pages. The shift is palpable, even if it is only in its early stages. Web companies large and small are embracing this stream. It is not just Twitter. It is Facebook and Friendfeed and AOL and Digg and Tweetdeck and Seesmic Desktop and Techmeme and Tweetmeme and Ustream and Qik and Kyte and blogs and Google Reader. The stream is winding its way throughout the Web and organizing it by nowness.

This real-time stream has been building for a while. It began with RSS, but is now so much stronger and swifter, encompassing not just periodic news and musings but constant communication, status updates, instantly shared thoughts, photos, and videos.

What does this mean for how we will come to consume information?

Today saw the launch of two new real-time search engines, from OneRiot and Tweetmeme. While the two are slightly different in ways that I went into earlier, all that really matters are the results you get. So I put those two to the test along with Twitter Search, Google Search, FriendFeed and the recently launched Scoopler. To see which would give the best results based on a current event.

One bit of news I was interested in was the space shuttle, because it received some damage today while venturing into space. I decided to do a pretty generic search for “Space Shuttle,” since that is likely what most people would enter of all the possible combinations of words. Here are the results:

Tweetmeme, 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.

Twitscoop, a real-time visualization tool that lets you see hot trends and buzz on Twitter, is getting a makeover and adding several useful features that may help you “mine the thought stream.” These features will roll out this morning. Twitscoop’s algorithm identifies tags and keywords in the Twitter stream and then ranks them by how frequently they appear versus normal usage. Twitscoop detects growing trends in real-time, identifies breaking news and then monitors specific keywords along with graphs that display the activity for any given word on twitter. The results are also displayed in a “Tag Cloud,” where the hotter tags are presented in a bigger front.

Besides showing the trending topics on Twitter, Twitscoop, which provides a service similar to Tweetag, Tweetmeme, and Twitturly, also lets you search Twitter messages for trending topics. Twitscoop is becoming a full-fledged Twitter service, adding oAuth to let you sign in with your Twitter account and tweet from the site without leaving the page. Additionally, you will be able shorten urls and tweet searches from the site.

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.