Tweetmeme Announces Updated Retweet Button

Retweets are currently the hottest way to spread a story online. In just a few months Twitter has come from behind and has become the main source of link sharing on the web, outpacing established resources like Digg. And to make it even easier to share a story, Tweetmeme, the hot topic trending service for Twitter, has released an updated “retweet” button for blogs or other web sites.

Tweetmeme's retweet button has proved quite successful, already getting 196 million impressions a week on the sites it is being used, but the company is making some changes to make it even more powerful. The first big change was to remove the @tweetmeme at the end of each retweet to give users a little more space in the message. But this isn't all, as the new button comes with some increased functionality.

“The current retweet button is a clever little thing – it can redirect you to Twitter to retweet but also if you’re logged into TweetMeme (via OAuth) it sends the tweet behind the scenes and leaves you on the site you were currently browsing, this we call ‘one-click retweeting’, “ Nick Halstead, Fav.or.it CEO, Tweetmeme's parent company, said in the blog post announcing the new features.

Until now adding the button meant using JavaScript but the company now offers a new option for the cases when this isn't possible. The new image retweet button will allow users to add the functionality to RSS feeds, emails or other services. A couple of other features were announced also, namely the “Domain Count” and “Analytics.” The former gives web site owners a way of keeping up with the total number of retweets in a week, not just the initial ones coming from the site. The latter will offer detailed statistics on how a story spread throughout Twitter.