14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter's popularity has helped several related services see massive growth along with the microblogging site. URL shorteners have been popping up left and right, with dozens of competing but mostly similar products. Retweeting services have also seen huge growth, especially Tweetmeme, so it's no surprise that others are trying to get in on the game. Competitor ReTweet is about to launch its service, after some “hiccups,” and is gunning for Tweetmeme.
“When retweet.com goes live tomorrow [8/19/09] at around [12pm EST] you will find we are running a competition to entice early adopters of tweetmeme.com to try retweet.com. The competition page, that will be found here (http://retweet.com/win10k) tomorrow will be announcing our $10,000 reward that will go to one lucky blogger who implements our retweet button, rewarded once we reach 1 million visitors,” Mesiab Labs, ReTweet's parent company, told Mashable in an email.
ReTweet will launch with the same basic features like Tweetmeme. The site will offer a retweet button that can be embedded on sites or blogs to offer users a fast way of sharing a story on Twitter. It will also keep track of the most shared stories and provide some stats on the most popular ones. Nothing revolutionary but it doesn't have to be to get it started.
Along with the new site ReTweet is also launching a new contest, promising $10,000 to one lucky user once the site reaches 1 million visitors. A million visitors might sound like a tall order but Tweetmeme is pulling in 10 times that, having seen massive growth in the few months since it was launched. In fact, the site got 11.8 million unique visitors in July in the US while Twitter itself got 23.2 million.
ReTweet’s main asset is actually its domain name, retweet.com, which should help the site to some degree but this and the $10,000 prize may be far from enough to get users to switch from Tweetmeme. And there are other issues as well, as ReTweet was found to be using Tweetmeme's actual code in the retweet button at some point in the development of the site. The code has been removed since but the incident is fresh in everyone's mind. But all this may be moot as Twitter has just revealed plans to completely revamp the way retweeting works and to actually implement a retweeting system at the site level, and it's unclear how this will affect sites like these.