14 DAY TRIAL // The very same day its competitor ReTweet has launched its service, Tweetmeme is announcing a brand-new feature to come in next week. Retweeting blog posts is what Tweetmeme is all about but the site now wants to extend the functionality to comments as well. The feature will only be implemented to the comments on Tweetmeme itself but, thanks to an upcoming API, it could be used by individual blog owners as well.
“When we started looking at commenting on TweetMeme our primary goal was to allow good quality comments to be retweeted,” Nick Halstead, Tweetmeme's founder, said. “I am sure everyone has found that discussions on blogs ‘can’ be absolutely compelling and that it is not unusual to find single comments that run to numbers of pages and would in themselves often warrant being their own blog post. These often go overlooked by a large proportion of readership that doesn’t have the time to read through all the comments on a single story.”
Next week Tweetmeme will introduce comments on its site, allowing users to have their say on any popular retweets. The interesting thing about this is that the comments themselves will also be retweetable thus getting better visibility. The most retweeted comments will also rise above the less popular ones, making the retweet button somewhat of a voting system.
There are some concerns though, as many have pointed out, as comments don't lend themselves to be retweeted inside less than 140 characters as normal blog posts do. While the headline and a link make for a good format for tweets, a small excerpt from a comment, very likely longer than 140 characters, doesn't work as well. This is one of the reasons why the feature will only be implemented by Tweetmeme on the site itself, meaning there will be no “official” comment retweet button. There will, however, be an API available so individual blog owners or comment platforms could implement the functionality if they like.