Tweetmeme is receiving colossal amounts of traffic at the moment. And the numbers are still growing at an extraordinary rate: according to compete.com, Tweetmeme just saw 85% month-on-month growth: contrast that with Twitter’s own 1.25%. The service received 11.8m uniques in July, compared to Twitter’s 23.2m.
Crikey. No wonder Mesiab Labs wanted in on the action. And no wonder Nick Halstead recently wound down fav.or.it to concentrate on his new product. The only question is: how can Tweetmeme possibly make enough money even to cover its server costs?
Maybe they don’t intend to. bit.ly is now Twitter’s standard URL shortener, which has led to rumours Twitter is planning to snap it up. Tweetmeme seems to be the de facto standard retweet service now, though it’s by no means the only service out there: Twitlinks, Quotably and Twitturly occupy a similar space. Surely Twitter would be foolish not to consider acquiring one of these services?
Is there a reason Twitter still doesn’t have a retweet button on its own web interface? What do you think?