ReTweet.com Launches to Take on TweetMeme

After all the debacles and controversy, ReTweet.com is finally here. The announcement was full of fighting words like “the real retweet button” and enticing new users with a $10,000 prize. But now that it's finally here, anyone can see for themselves if the site has the features to back up the talk.

“Retweet.com is a powerful news site that leverages crowd-sourcing by scanning literally thousands of real time sources per minute. This incredible technology allows Retweet.com to break news faster than any other news source in history. […] And we’re just getting started,” Kevin Mesiab, founder of Mesiab Labs, the company behind ReTweet, said. “Join the global conversation and help get the word out by adding the official Retweet Button to your blog or website and you could win $10,000.00 from Retweet.com.”

TweetMeme is the only real competitor in the retweet market. The site offers an embeddable retweet button that a great number of blogs have implemented and also tracks the most popular entries in several categories. It has half the traffic that Twitter gets in the US, so it's clearly a success.

ReTweet is a firm believer in “Why mess with perfection?” so the new site bears a “vague” resemblance to TweetMeme's. OK, it's a little more than vague with a big number of similarities from the color scheme, to the categories, to the layout; everything is pretty much the same. The functionality is also rather indistinguishable, not that it's necessarily a bad thing. Still, considering its past, this doesn't seem that surprising.

ReTweet was first announced a while ago with the aim of offering the best retweeting experience. However, the development process was mired with controversy after it was discovered that it “borrowed” entire segments of code from TweetMeme and used it on its own site and retweet button. After that, ReTweet blamed one of its software engineers for the “mistake” and removed the offending code. That didn't do too much good to its image and, just when it looked like the whole thing had blown over, it seems that ReTweet is still using some “borrowed” TweetMeme code (or at least the MySQL table names).