Short And Tweet: TweetMeme Introduces An URL Shortener Of Its Own

As if we needed yet another URL shortening service, TweetMeme is today debuting ReTwt.me in an effort to make that particular saturated field even more so. And it’s not like it does anything special in comparison with the plethora of similar services out there.

It shrinks longer links in order to make them more tweetable (and retweetable), it gives you some options to share links from its main website, throws in some analytics so you can see just how few people actually click those links you’re spreading and comes with an API.

The only slight advantage it could have over competitors like TinyURL and bit.ly is a tight integration with the TweetMeme service / button, but they won’t be exploiting that connection and keep on supporting the URL shortening services as they were before (which is obviously the right thing to do).

TweetMeme founder Nick Halstead asks the appropriate question in the e-mail announcing ReTwt.me: why did they build this? The answer:

Firstly and foremost ‘reliability’, we pride ourselves at TweetMeme for the continued up-time and scalability of the service. Going forward we wanted to have ‘platform security’ that we always had a fallback position if any of the current shorteners either closed down or had any outages.

I have my doubts about ReTwt.me being more serious about uptime and scalability than some of the other services, like bit.ly (a venture-capital funded startup to which URL shortening and analytics is core business) and Digg (which I’m sure has a lot more load on its servers than TweetMeme currently has), but having a fall-back option I guess makes sense.

Nevertheless, I can’t imagine why any end user would want to switch to ReTwt.me for URL shortening purposes. Halstead bets on the simpleness of the service, but I don’t know how anyone could make the existing URL shortening services more basic than they already are.

But please do judge for yourself (and don’t forget to retwt this story).