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.

The idea seems like an obvious one for the company. It’s similar to what Digg is doing with its Digg ads, where users can vote on advertisements just as they would with regular content. The difference here is that you would be sending an ad to your contacts on Twitter. Is anyone really going to want to do that? And if they do, will their contacts start unfollowing them?

But the idea here is clearly not to share just any ad, but rather ads that have the potential to go viral — particularly video ads. And TweetMeme already has a big partner on board. They’ve just announced that they cut a deal with Federated Media in two weeks time. With this partnership, their button can be added into any standard advertisement that FM allows.

The tweeting out of ads or sponsored links has long been a controversial thing. Some are convinced this is a great way to make money, while others consider this absolutely pure spam. It’s an interesting play, to say the least. If TweetMeme is able to spread this idea the way they’ve spread their button, they’re going to make a ton of money.

AdTweets will launch in 2 weeks.

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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.

Now, to be fair, Strellner has moved on to other things in the past few months and acknowledges that little attention has been paid to the service for a while, but the low selling price is still undeniably a bit of a bummer for him and his team. Despite a PageRank 6 and an Alexa rank of 40,106, Twitturly only attracted about 1,000 unique visitors per day, and that’s not even enough to warrant anyone to start thinking about monetization.

It’s unclear who the winning bidder is, but he or she is getting the codebase for the site, one month of support from Strellner, some domain names and 622 GB of data.

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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. 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). Get your tickets here.

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.

If there is anything that is capturing the attention and excitement of the technology community right now, it is realtime streams. Twitter, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and startups galore are all active in the realtime Web and will be at the event. Nearly 40 startups applied to fill ten demo slots for new realtime product launches.

But as more of us immerse ourselves in our Twitter and Facebook streams, and Foursquare check-ins, the need to filter out the noise is becoming acute. That will be a big theme, and we’ll hear about different approaches to do that ranging from better user interfaces to better realtime search. We are also seeing the emergence of new types of streams, particularly geo streams that tell everyone where you are at any given moment, and media streams that inject photos, videos, and other content beyond text into the the realtime conversation.

The CrunchUp will explore both the technological side of the phenomenon and the business side. These streams represent a new communications layer across the Web, as well as a platform for building products and startups. Come join us to find out where the stream is going next.

If you feel like your company can add to the few holes left in the agenda, please contact us at realtime [at] techcrunch [dot] com. Bloggers and journalists can request a press pass by contacting Daniel Brusilovsky.

The CrunchUp also provides an amazing sponsorship platform for start-ups and brands to reach both conference and networking attendees. Please contact Heather Harde or Jeanne Logozo to learn more about sponsorship packages and custom opportunities.

CRUNCHUP AGENDA

9:00 – 9:30 AM From RSS To Realtime: A Conversation With Twitter COO Dick Costolo

9:30 – 11:00 AM Roundtable: Filtering The Stream. Getting Rid of the Noise.

Facebook, VP of Product Chris Cox
Google, Google Fellow, Amit Singhal
Seesmic, CEO Loic Le Meur
Futurity Ventures, investor/entrepreneur Edo Segal
CrowdEye, CEO Ken Moss
Microsoft, GM of FUSE Labs, Lili Cheng
Facebook, VP of Platform, Bret Taylor
Thing Labs/Brizzly, CEO Jason Shellen
Angel Investor Ron Conway
MySpace, Chief Product Officer Jason Hirschhorn

11:00 – 11:15 AM Break

11:15 – 11:45 AM The Social Enterprise: A Conversation With Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff

11:45 – 12:30 PM Where Is The Stream Going? Tomorrow’s Killer Apps (Demos)

Hot Potato (event streams, launch)
Seesmic (a special surprise)
StatusNet (DIY microblogging, launch)
Stealth Startup (RT social address book)
Realtime Pitch From The Audience*

12:30 – 2:00 PM Lunch

2:00 – 2:45 PM Where Is The Stream Going? Tomorrow’s Killer Apps (Demos)

PlyMedia (new product launch)
Stealth Startup (live video streams)
Stealth Startup (RT news streams)
Tweetmeme (new product launch)
Rippol (video streams, public launch)
Stealth Startup (mobile noise assassin)
Realtime Pitch From the Audience*

2:45 – 3:30 PM Media Streams: Are These The Ultimate Marketing Vehicles?
DailyBooth, co-founder Ryan Amos
Ad.ly, CEO Sean Rad
Hollywood agent, Robin Bechtel (digital strategist for Britney Spears, Warner Bros. Records)
more
NewTek, SVP strategic development Philip Nelson

3:30 – 3:45 Break

3:45 – 4:30 Geo Streams: We Know Where You Are, Right Now
Foursquare, VP business development Tristan Walker
Twitter, director of platform Ryan Sarver
Google, Steve Lee, Group Product Manager Google Maps for Mobile and Google Latitude
SimpleGeo, founder Matt Galligan
Hot Potato, founder Justin Shaffer
Mixer Labs, CEO Elad Gil

4:30 – 5:00 Can We Kill Email Already? All Aboard The Micro-Message Bus
A discussion with Paul Buchheit (Facebook/Friendfeed/Gmail) and Rob Goldman, CEO Threadsy

5:00 – 5:45 PM Where The Realtime Rubber Meets The Road: When Does The Serious Money Come In?

Angel investor, Ron Conway
Microsoft, corporate VP for Strategic and Emerging Business Development, Dan’l Lewin
Charles River Ventures, VC George Zachary
Accel Partners, VC Andrew Braccia
Facebook/Friendfeed, Paul Buchheit

5:45 – 7:30 PM Realtime After Party

Tickets are on sale now. You can still get them for $395. Prices go up to $495 the week before the event.

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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.

Topsy TopLinks

Today Topsy is releasing new lists of top links being shared on Twitter at any given time. The product is called Topsy TopLinks. There are lists for the Top 100, Top 1,000 and Top 5,000 links. You can also search within the lists – example.

Users can grab RSS feeds for TopLinks, or even feeds for searches within TopLinks.

Like Bit.ly Now and TweetMeme, Topsy TopLinks is a great way to see what’s hot on Twitter right now. And by using influence they cut out the spammy stuff.

Topsy ReTweet Button

Topsy is now offering a Wordpress plugin that gives sites a TweetMeme-like retweet button. And it also shows any badges earned for the URL in TopLinks. Here’s how it looks:

Advanced Query Syntax

Among the other changes at Topsy, the site now supports new advanced search queries.

from: – e.g. ‘from:Topsy influence’

Using this search query will limit your results to links about ‘influence’ that were posted by the Topsy account.

site: – e.g. ’site:techcrunch.com Topsy’

Using this search query will limit your results to links on the TechCrunch site that are about Topsy.

site: – e.g. ’site:eu.techcrunch.com twitter’

Using this search query will limit your results to links on the EU version of the TechCrunch site that include the term ‘twitter’.

site: – e.g. ’site:wired.com/gadgets twitter’

Using this search query will limit your results to links that are within the gadgets section of the the wired.com site and include the term ‘twitter’.

We remain big fans of Topsy. They are amassing a huge long term database of popular links from Twitter, and allowing search and discovery against those links based on advanced search techniques and the idea of influence among Twitter users. The company is based in San Francisco, has 16 employees and has raised $15 million in venture funding.

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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.

Comscore tracks 721,000 worldwide monthly unique visitors to TweetMeme. Quantcast says the number is more like 2.4 million. Google Trends barely registers TweetMeme against URL shortener service Bit.ly, which is similar to TweetMeme in some ways.

We believe Compete is simply counting all those javascript widgets that sites like us include on their stories. Which means it’s basically aggregating all of the traffic stats from sites that use TweetMeme. Not so useful.

Why This Matters

Everyone is trying to take real time Twitter data and massage it into a useful, filtered news stream. Bit.ly has a new product on the way called Bit.ly Now. Digg is rebuilding the service from the ground up to take advantage of Twitter data in figuring out what’s hot sooner.

If TweetMeme is really drawing that much traffic, it puts them ahead of Bit.ly and near Digg in total traffic. And that makes them a third contender in an already crowded space.

In the upcoming war between Bit.ly and Digg (and maybe TweetMeme), what matters, besides access to Twitter’s data flow, is the total traffic base to start things off. The ability to index and categorize links on the fly is also important, and all of these companies are working on ways to properly analyze data in milliseconds, which is hard to do properly at scale.

A lot is going to happen in this space in the near future.

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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.

Companies can create a customizable branded page with a vanity URL and can designate an “Insiders” tab within the channel which has a list of Twittering employees or users associated with a company.

Channels also include a “Chatter” tab that uses a list of search terms relevant to a company or brand to find both tweets and links that contain those terms; a “Links” tab that displays the hyperlinks containing matches to the list of search terms; and a widget to share and link to a brand’s site, blog, Facebook or MySpace page and more. Currently, TweetMixx has branded channels for PC Mag, the Discovery Channel’s Deadliest Catch, Duke University Basketball and others.

It seems prudent for TweetMixx to put their Twitter link discovery platform to good use for brands, as more and more companies and brands look to the microblogging network to engage with consumers. The site serves as a content discovery engine as well. TweetMixx also acts a Twitter client and features filtered search options, which makes it an all-in-one platform for both consumers and companies.

As we’ve said in the past, TweetMixx faces competition from TweetMeme, a popular engine for Twitter link discovery. TweetMeme also features branded channels, with WordPress, AstonMartin, and many others all including channels on TweetMeme’s platform. On TweetMeme’s channels, content is broken down by news, video and images whereas TweetMixx breaks the stream down by the Insiders, general chatter and links. Bit.ly also features analytics and information on links and will soon feature a link discovery engine of their own, but it’s unclear if it will include branded channels.

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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!).

The Analytics service will be part of a new My Tweetmeme tab on the main site. (In the future, users will be able to create their own channels on Tweetmeme on this tab as well). When you click on Analytics, you enter the Website URL you want to analyze. It then shows the most recent posts or articles for that site. You have to pick a link to build a report around it, which takes a few minutes, but the reports are kind of useless unless they contain the most up to the minute data. Still, if you want to create a lot of reports, you have to schedule them, which is a bit of a drawback.

Once the report is created, you can dive down into data about tweets, retweets, clicks, domians, users, and locations. I’ve created a few reports for TechCrunch links and the charts are a real real eye-opener because no matter what the link, there is always a spike and then it trails off real fast. If you want to keep something alive on Twitter, you have to keep tweeting it out repeatedly. Of course, that will annoy your followers and you may lose them.

So maybe you might want to target your most influential followers instead, which Tweetmeme helps you figure out as well. For every link, it lists the most influential users who posted the link, along with the number of resulting retweets from that user. You can even drill down to see each user’s retweet tree.

Social media experts are going to love this because it will give them something to do and maybe charge their clients extra for, which is why Tweetmeme is charging for access to the Analytics. After a one-month free trial, Analytics will cost $50 per month per domain or $500 per month for an unlimited number of domains. Thus, Tweetmeme joins startups like bit.ly in the belief that there is money to be made in all of this Twitter data.

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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.

But to share pages you are on as quickly as possible, you also have to install TwittLink’s own Retweet button. It looks to be an exact copy of Tweetmeme’s popular button, but it’s in orange instead of green. And clicking on it launches the TwittLink widget rather than populating the tweet area on Twitter.com. If you’re willing to install both things on your site, it will save your readers some time in sharing, as they will never have to leave your page.

The ability to see other users who are tweeting from the same site you are on in real-time is interesting. But if TwittLink were to take off it could face questions from both Tweetmeme over the button (this happened previously with Retweet.com), and Leo Laporte’s TWiT Network over the name (this happens quite a bit).

Update: Also check out TBUZZ (our coverage).

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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.

The MySpace short links can be used for any URL, but it is the status updates which seem to be what they are being used for the most. So that’s not really a huge threat to bit.ly, even if it does represent a large and growing volume of short links on Twitter. Not everyone can see those status updates once they click through. You typically have to be that person’s friend on MySpace to even see the update. But the proliferation of lnk.ms links does show how easy it is for a large service like MySpace to inject itself into the conversation on Twitter with a simple feature like two-way sync.

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Back in July

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.

On top of showing off the links from your friends, you can also view all the tweets (including those without links), just as you would on Twitter.com. And you can update your status from TweetMixx. As a straight-up Twitter client, it’s not a bad one, as it’s fast, and the plain-English link idea is a pretty nice one. There’s also an area to basically saved filtered searches for links you may be particularly interested in. Saved filtered searches are nothing new for Twitter clients, but the link angle is again, a nice one.

The problem will be getting people to use TweetMixx rather than the current favorite TweetMeme for Twitter link discovery. I think much of what TweetMixx offers is actually more compelling than TweetMeme (the personalized links on top of the popular links section), but TweetMeme controls the all-important retweet button right now across the web, and as such has the mindshare for links on Twitter.

And then there’s the wildcard that is gearing up to enter the race: Bit.ly. As the default URL shortener for Twitter, Bit.ly already has a ton of interesting link data that it will apparently soon use for some kind of link discovery site of its own.

Still, TweetMixx is definitely worth taking for a spin if you’re particularly interested in links your friends are sharing, or those for particular queries. And the fact that it can be used as a pretty nice looking Twitter client on top of a link aggregator is a bonus.

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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.

Another interesting note: TweetMeme is teaming with JS-Kit to add support for its real-time commenting engine Echo , which will now be able to import TweetMeme contents into blogs. TweetMeme will also begin promoting Echo, presumably in the hopes of having its reach widened as its comments appear in more blogs.

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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).

TweetMeme founder Nick Halstead asks the appropriate question in the e-mail announcing ReTwt.me: why did they build this? The answer:

Firstly and foremost ‘reliability’, we pride ourselves at TweetMeme for the continued up-time and scalability of the service. Going forward we wanted to have ‘platform security’ that we always had a fallback position if any of the current shorteners either closed down or had any outages.

I have my doubts about ReTwt.me being more serious about uptime and scalability than some of the other services, like bit.ly (a venture-capital funded startup to which URL shortening and analytics is core business) and Digg (which I’m sure has a lot more load on its servers than TweetMeme currently has), but having a fall-back option I guess makes sense.

Nevertheless, I can’t imagine why any end user would want to switch to ReTwt.me for URL shortening purposes. Halstead bets on the simpleness of the service, but I don’t know how anyone could make the existing URL shortening services more basic than they already are.

But please do judge for yourself (and don’t forget to retwt this story).

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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.

There are a few caveats about this number. It doesn’t count people who click on the retweet button who are not members of Twitter. It only counts the overlap. So the actual number of clicks is no doubt higher. In fact, on the retweet button in RSS feeds and for people who are already logged into Twitter (which TweetMeme can measure), the click-through rate is 1 percent. But the vast majority of impressions are for people who are not logged in. So the real click-through rate is somewhere in between 0.375 percent and 1 percent.

The other thing to remember is that it can take fewer retweets to make an article go viral than, say, Diggs. Depending on how many followers each retweeter has and how many actually click on the link, a few retweets can be all it takes to drive a ton of people to that blog post. Twitter certainly drives a lot of traffic to TechCrunch, but we don’t really know how much of that is due to retweets.

TweetMeme is working on giving Websites who use its retweet button better insight into downstream traffic. Halstead also revealed that it is going to release an analytics service which measures traffic coming from retweets. He’d better hurry up with that before Twitter itself beats him to the punch.

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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.

All a blogger has to do to win the cash is install the button and fill out a short form to let ReTweet.com know where it is installed. Oh, and ReTweet.com has to surpass 1 million visitors in the next 30 days. So far, after about a day, they’re at just over 30,000 visitors.

And just incase the $10,000 doesn’t entice you to install their button, ReTweet.com has also commissioned the following extremely annoying video apparently made by a fitness blogger. Actually, this video may be genius. I could see either “retweet your tweets on the web” or “in THIS economy?” turning into their own memes. And I can certainly see this video showing up on TweetMeme.

[thanks Sean]

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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.

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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.

(In the interest of full disclosure: we use TweetMeme’s retweet button here on the TechCrunch network)

Since ReTweet.com hadn’t yet launched when the online arguments between both startups began to heat up, it was hard to argue how similar both websites would turn out to be, although the screenshots provided suggested that they’d look much alike. And now that ReTweet.com is finally live, the similarity with TweetMeme is indeed striking:

Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with inspiring one’s website design on another service, but considering the fact there are only two noteworthy players in this game and the heat had already been turned on by other events, it may have been wiser for Mesiab Labs to at least try and make it look different enough. But no, the lay-out, wording and color scheme of ReTweet.com is clearly a blatant rip-off, and I’m sure they intended it that way too.

I’m reluctant to take a side here, but having tracked Mesiab Labs and their despicable Hummingbird product for a number of months already (more on that later), I’m leaning towards sympathizing with TweetMeme here. They could use some competition for sure, but I’d rather see both companies compete based on merit and trying new things rather than fighting with words and fencing with lawsuit threats.

And to reiterate Erick’s earlier point: Twitter could well end up trademarking the term ‘retweet’ just like they did with the word ‘tweet’.

Update: also, @Retweet appears to be a suspended account.

To be continued, I’m sure.

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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:

What caught my attention was that some industrious individual (@travisketchum) had left a comment on the TechCrunch article that he had been doing some digging around on the website and had found a link to their development environment. What we found ourselves was that our retweet button Javascript and the Wordpress plugin code seemed to have been directly copied from ours.

Update: ReTweet (or at least its holding company Mesiab Labs) responds.

He had to look no further than the code for the retweet button itself. The code below is what he found, which he says is “an exact copy of our own retweet button code with the word ‘tweetmeme’ replaced with ‘retweet’”.

(function()
{
var _url=window.location.href;
var _url=_url.replace(/((?:?|&)?fbc_receiver=.+)?(?:#.*)?$/,”");
var url=((typeof retweet_url==”string”)?retweet_url:((typeof retweet_URL==”string”)?retweet_URL:_url)).replace(/+/g,”%2b”);
var source=(typeof retweet_source==”string”)?escape(retweet_source):((typeof retweet_SOURCE==”string”)?escape(retweet_SOURCE):false);
var style=(typeof retweet_style==”string”)?escape(retweet_style):((typeof retweet_STYLE==”string”)?escape(retweet_STYLE):”normal”);
var src=”http://174.129.199.128/meme/widget/tweets/”;
switch(style){
case”compact”:
var h=20;var w=90;break;
case”rednose”:var h=71;var w=60;break;default:var h=71;var w=60;break
}
src+=url;
if(source!=false)
{
src+=”&source=”+source
}
document.write(”);
retweet_url=null;
retweet_URL=null;
retweet_source=null;
retweet_SOURCE=null;
retweet_style=null;
retweet_STYLE=null})();

I just hope all of these startups realize that Twitter could just end up trademarking the term just like they did with Tweet.

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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).

And there’s more. The group behind Retweet.com, Mesiab Labs (which seems to have a poor reputation among the Twitter community for products like Hummingbird, that some have accussed of spamming others), has a few sites related to Retweet.com that are already live. One is the URL shortener RT.nu, which will clearly be used to send out the retweets from Retweet.com. Another site, Checkretweet, scours Twitter for retweets for any user. Each of these play into the bigger strategy of the site, according to this blog post. And here’s the key nugget from that post, “Together, these systems allow us to detect and deliver breaking news faster than any other media outlet at present.”

So it looks like they’re setting up Retweet to take on not only TweetMeme, but also Digg, Google News, Techmeme and the new service that Bit.ly is working on. They key to all of this is obviously the links that are getting tweeted out and then retweeted. And because the latter word is entering the lexicon of the web, Retweet.com has a pretty awesome domain for trying to come along with a new service in this field.

That little trademark sign in the upper right hand corner of the logo is also interesting. It may just be for the logo, because it seems like they might have a hard time trademarking the word “retweet.” Though, that would be a potentially very scary situation for TweetMeme and all those little green buttons.

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves though, Retweet.com still has to execute — and launch. But this is probably something to watch.

[thanks Orli]

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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).

I won’t dive deep into the details of the story because I’m trying to make a larger point, but here’s the gist: Hoekstra feels she doesn’t get enough credit publicly about the original idea for Tweetmeme, and calls out the company’s founder Nick Halstead for acknowledging her role and suggest perhaps they should even consider writing her a check. According to her, Halstead has been open about her role in Tweetmeme’s early days but has stopped doing that ever since they’ve raised about $650,000 in seed financing for taking the service to the next level. Halstead’s side of the story boils down to the fact that she was very involved in the (not so great) first version of the product, but they let it languish for 8 months and finally refocused and turned it into a great service without her help.

I tend to lean towards Halstead’s view on all this, despite my respect for Marjolein and knowing how knowledgeable she is about the Web and Twitter in particular. The way I see it, Tweetmeme is what it is in part of what Hoekstra talked about with Halstead et al. in the early days, through direct messages on Twitter and conversations on Skype. But it was a fairly obvious idea in the first place, and there were already others competing for the title “Techmeme for Twitter stories” when it first came out.

I’ve been in similar situations myself, having discussed business ideas with people online or offline and seeing them start a company, add a certain feature or rethink their strategy after these conversations (not that I’m saying I’m always right, quite the contrary). Sometimes I get credited, sometimes I don’t. But usually it’s not something I care much about, because I realize ideas are essentially a dime a dozen and there’s little chance that these people wouldn’t have made these moves without my help. Furthermore, most of the time it pleases me to see something happen because of something I told someone, whether it gets publicly credited or not.

I understand Hoekstra’s sentiment, but in general, I also think if your role is that significant from the get-go you should become a partner or somehow try to get compensated for your work early on. Complaining about not getting enough credit this late in the game comes off as envy rather than a call for sympathy, even if I know in Hoekstra’s case it’s most certainly the latter. To her credit, she blogs she just wants to get stuff settled between them and then move on.

Question is: what should one expect for helping shape an idea that turned into a business after many meetings, a lot of trial and error and some risk taking which did not involve her?

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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, or the one at right. 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.

More importantly, the retweet buttons will begin supporting URL shortening service other than bit.ly, and will include an option for sites to choose their own custom short URL. (For instance, we use http://tcrn.ch). Tweetmeme will also offer analytics for site owners to see how their retweets are spreading. Basic data will be free, and Tweetmeme will likely charge for more detailed analyticss. All of this, of course, also turns into valuable data for Tweetmeme to determine the most popular links and stories on Twitter, and makes Tweetmeme itself a better news aggregation site.

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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.”

This raises an interesting dilemma. If real time data streams are akin to the living consciousness of the Web, how do you search them? How do you search consciousness? It is not the same as searching memory, which is what Google does when it looks at its indexed archive of the Web and how those pieces of information build up authority over time. The real time search dilemma centers precisely around how to rank results, and how to resolve the tension between recency and relevancy.

The default, or at least the starting point, for most real time search engines is simply to put the most recent results up top and then keep pushing then down in a free-flowing river of information as new results which match the query come in. That is what Twitter search does, for instance. It is a chronological stream of the most recent Tweets containing a particular set of keywords. Real time search startup Collecta also takes this approach of simply presenting the stream as it comes in, and letting you filter by source. Ranking results any other way would automatically reorder them and automatically make them less real-time.

Yet not being able to filter that stream generates too much noise. Other approaches attempt to add in other factors. OneRiot, for instance, is developing what it calls PulseRank, which takes into account the freshness of the information, the link authority of the Webpage where it is coming from, the authority of the person who is sharing the link, and the velocity with which the information is being passed around the Web. This seems like a reasonable approach, but it may not catch something important as fast as simply watching the unadulterated stream.

There are other approaches as well. You can look at what people on the Web are actually doing in real time or look for variations in the stream of mentions for any given keyword to notice spikes of activity. When everyone is talking about Michael Jackson or Iran above and beyond the normal level of chatter for those topics, that is when you want to know that you need to pay attention. So maybe real time search is more like an alert system.

Can you search consciousness, or can you only watch it pass by? We’ll be debating this at one of the panels on real time search at our Real Time Stream CrunchUp in July. But it is clear that in order to make sense of the stream, it needs to be ranked by order of importance as well as by time.

(Photo credit: Flickr/Andrew Sea)

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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.

Another nice feature is that clicking on any link provides an overlay to give you more information about the URL, including a few quick lines from blog posts and a thumbnail of an image used. Naturally, there is also a retweet button here to allow you to easily resend the tweet back to Twitter by way of TweetMeme. Hovering over a Twitter icon in TweetTabs also presents the options to retweet, reply to a tweet, or to see that user’s Twitter profile.

You can drag and drop to change the order of the tabs, and if you close the window, TweetTabs will remember which searches you had opened.

A service like this really couldn’t come along at a more perfect time. If you want to track what is going on in Iran, but really don’t want to have a dedicated Twitter Search window just open to that all day, it can now just be one of the many search tabs you have open. And if you really don’t like the browser-only aspect of it, TweetTabs has a solution for that too:

If you want to get #TweetTabs on your desktop then download chrome or prism for firefox and save it as an application!

Unfortunately, I think the API may be limiting the full real-time aspect of the service. Tweets about Iran, for example, start flowing quickly but then seem to hang for a while. If they can get that resolved though, this may be the ultimate web-based Twitter search tool.

TweetTabs is just the first of a range of “complimentary” Twitter-based services TweetMeme founder Nick Halstead plans to launch over the next several months, he says.

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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? John Borthwick from Betaworks has identified the real-time Web as a key investment opportunity (Betaworks portfolio companies include Twitter, bit.ly, Tweetdeck, Chartbeat, and Tumblr). He admits he and other investors are still feeling in the dark, but he describes the shift he is trying to capitalize on this way in a post titled “Distribution . . . now”:

First and foremost what emerges out of this is a new metaphor — think streams vs. pages.

In the initial design of the web reading and writing (editing) were given equal consideration – yet for fifteen years the primary metaphor of the web has been pages and reading. The metaphors we used to circumscribe this possibility set were mostly drawn from books and architecture (pages, browser, sites etc.). Most of these metaphors were static and one way. The steam metaphor is fundamentally different. It’s dynamic, it doesn’t live very well within a page and still very much evolving.

A stream. A real time, flowing, dynamic stream of information — that we as users and participants can dip in and out of and whether we participate in them or simply observe we are a part of this flow.

In a sense, he is trying to rationalize his investment strategy. But if he is correct, the shift from pages to ever-widening eddies of information will have a dramatic downstream impact on many Web businesses, especially media businesses. This rising stream has the potential to fundamentally change the contours of media distribution on the Web. Large destination sites like Yahoo and AOL, already weakened as distribution hubs by search and social networks, now face the prospect of becoming completely bypassed. No wonder AOL is sticking the stream in every part of its service, from its homepage to Bebo to AIM. (Yahoo is grappling with the emergence of the stream as well, but so far still thinks it can hold onto its place as a central traffic and distribution hub).

The stream does not replace Web pages or search, for that matter, but it has the potential to completely transform them. Already, we are seeing Web pages adopt the stream as a new user-interface. Web pages are increasingly being designed as places to present the most relevant streams of information. And with streams of data spreading everywhere, search actually becomes more important than ever as a navigation tool. As Borthwick points out:

Traffic isn’t distributed evenly in this new world. All of a sudden crowds can show up on your site.

Traffic occurs in bursts, depending on what people are paying attention to at that second across a variety of services. Someone might notice an obscure blog post on Twitter, where it starts spreading, then it moves to FriendFeed and Facebook and desktop stream readers such as Tweetdeck or Seesmic desktop and before you know it, a hundred thousand people are reading that article. The stream creates a different form of syndication which cannot be licensed and cannot be controlled.

The problem, more than ever before, becomes one of information overload. How do you keep from drowning in the deluge? Borthwick suggests letting go of the notion that you can ever master the stream, even just your own personal data stream of friend’s Tweets, updates, blog posts, Flickr photos, YouTube video finds and so on:

This isn’t an inbox we have to empty, or a page we have to get to the bottom of — its a flow of data that we can dip into at will but we can’t attempt to gain an all encompassing view of it.

So jump into the stream and let it carry you away. Or you can stand timidly on the banks until everyone else around you has already taken the plunge.

(More stream reading: Nova Spivack and Om Malik. Photo credit: Flickr/Justin Lowery)

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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:

1. Google: The top result was from a Google News story about the shuttle damage. That’s good, that’s what I was looking for. The rest was historical information I didn’t want or need. Sure, I could have used a Google News search, which would have no doubt returned more relevant results (but maybe not that relevant), but most people still use just regular old Google.com, so that’s what I did.

2. Twitter Search: The first result is pretty telling: “Just watched the space shuttle go overhead — so cool” That’s nice, but gives me absolutely nothing in terms of what I’m looking for. The second and fourth results were good and gave me links for more info — now you see why Twitter wants to (and should) get into the business of crawling links for its search results.

3. FriendFeed: The top two results are good, but the rest are just general information about the launch. This is an interesting set of results because unlike Twitter Search results, FriendFeed filters everything through my friends by default. That’s good for certain searches, but maybe not so good for big, meaningful searches when you’re frantically looking for information.

4. Scoopler: With its mixture of live tweets coming in and popular content, Scoopler gives me some pretty solid results for what I’m looking for. And it’s presented in a way that’s pretty easy to follow. I like this one, a lot.

5. OneRiot: The top two results in the “Realtime” view are good, but the others aren’t what I’m looking for. The Pulse view isn’t much better. The relevant results come from Twitter or OneRiot itself. There’s nothing from Digg in terms of what I’m looking for. (OneRiot scans Twitter and Digg.)

6. Tweetmeme: Tweetmeme’s search defaults to the “Best Match” area which gives you a solid result for the number one and three items. When sorted by “Age,” the results are all over the place.

Second test: For a second test (not pictured), I did a query for “Miss California” — another hot topic on the web right now. Being as this one is a little less time-sensitive, the results were better across the board. OneRiot showed quite a few Digg results this time around, and even Google had some relevevant links beyond its Google News top area hits. Scoopler had some good popular results, but its Live area was dominated by tweets mostly making jokes to friends about the beauty queen. Tweetmeme’s “Highest Tweets” area really shined here.

Conclusion: It’s hard to declare one single winner because results vary based on how fresh the topic being queried is. Scoopler seems to work very nicely for breaking news as it mixes in an auto-refreshing Twitter search stream (as I keep going back to, it’s dominated by tweets) with popular items. Tweetmeme seems to work very well for slightly older items that have been retweeted a lot. OneRiot is nice in that it crawls the individual pages to get better content, but for breaking news, I’m not sure that it actually works better than a quick topical scan of a bunch of items. And FriendFeed’s search is great if you want to see what your friends are saying about something, but trickier if you go outside your social circle.

It seems pretty clear why Google is interested in adding a real-time layer to its search capabilites, while Twitter wants to crawl pages with its engine — the combo is pretty killer.

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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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