Editor’s note: This is a guest post submitted by Mahendra Palsule, who has worked as an Editor at Techmeme since 2009. Apart from curating tech news, he likes analyzing trends in startups and the social web. He is based in Pune, India, and you can follow him on Twitter.

What’s the Next Big Thing after social networking?

This has been a favorite topic of much speculation among tech enthusiasts for many years. I think we are already witnessing a paradigm shift – a move away from simple social sharing towards personalized, relevant content.

The key element of the next big thing is the increasing significance of the Interest Graph to complement the Social Graph. While Facebook, Twitter, and Google are already working on delivering relevant content, a slew of startups are focusing exclusively on it.

Relevance is the only solution to the problem of information overload.

The above matrix is a representation of how the process of online information discovery has evolved over time.

Phase I: The Search Dominated Web

This is how Google began its dominance over the web two decades ago, using PageRank to surface the most popular web pages as identified by other web pages that linked to them.

Phase II: Web 2.0 With Social Bookmarking

In the Web 2.0 era, social bookmarking services gained significant traction, surfacing popular content. Sites like Reddit and StumbleUpon are hugely popular even today, driving millions of page views.

Phase III: Personalized Recommendations

Services like Hunch, GetGlue, etc. have focused on building an Interest Graph for users, to deliver personalized recommendations using a ‘taste engine’.

Phase IV: Personalized Serendipity

The latest crop of startups is focusing on personalization using a combination of Interest and Social Graphs. Personalized Serendipity is what Jeff Jarvis calls ‘Unexpected Relevance’. Examples include Gravity, my6sense, Genieo, and TrapIt.

What Exactly Is Relevance?

The battle against information overload is sometimes presented as a choice between Relevance and Popularity, where ‘relevant’ is equated to ‘personalized’ as against popular.

However, Relevance does not always mean Personalized. Relevance is very dynamic – it depends on the needs of a person at a specific point in time. There are times when users want to know about the most popular stories, and other times when they seek personalized content.

There are multiple approaches to filtering information for Relevant Content. Google, Paper.li, and PostRank are examples of algorithmic filtering, while Reddit, Hacker News use a crowdsourcing approach. Klout can be used to filter Twitter streams by influence, while Facebook uses social affinity as a filter for its newsfeed and social signals for its new Comments Plugin. Location is another high-impact signal for delivering relevant content, gaining importance in a mobile world.

In other words, Relevance spans across all the quadrants of the Discovery Matrix above, and none of the above approaches to filtering for relevance is the ‘best approach’. There is no killer approach to Relevance. Henry Nothhaft, Jr., CMO of TrapIt, described it as “the myth of the sweet spot”. The competitive edge will be with services that support multiple discovery methods, multiple filtering approaches, have flexibility, and support multiple mobile platforms.

Quora: A Showcase Of The Interest Graph

Quora has pioneered the use of the Interest Graph as a dominant signal for its newsfeed. Quora asks new users to select Topics to follow, as part of its onboarding process, which is the first revelation that Topics are as important as Users to follow.

Quora’s newsfeed is an interesting showcase of what happens when you mix an Interest Graph with a Social Graph – and the result is the mysterious addictiveness so many have experienced, but found difficult to explain. An item pops up in your newsfeed not because you were following a user, but because you were following a related topic.

This often leads to Personalized Serendipity – or Unexpected Relevance – which is why Quora gets many people hooked.

The war over the Interest Graph began between Twitter and Facebook last year, as Erick described so eloquently. So how did Quora beat them to this game?

For starters, Quora is built from the ground-up with the Interest Graph being a backbone of the framework. Twitter’s ‘Browse Interests’ is too broad and primitive to be of use, even at present. And while Facebook has a mechanism for allowing publishers to push new items to your feed, most publishers have been unaware of this functionality.

This is also the reason why Facebook’s Like Button now publishes a full news feed story. The future clearly belongs to who best captures the Interest Graph as Max Levchin and Bill Gurley put it.

The implications of a Relevance-driven web are wide-ranging and broad in scope. Better utilization of the Interest Graph by services will lead to better ad targeting, and a potential decrease in reliance on CPM/CPC-based advertising. Monetization focus will be on higher yields through transactions and subscriptions as Dave McClure once described. Online media publishers will focus on Relevance Metrics revealing engagement and time-spent on site, than primitive metrics like page views and traffic.

Social media may lose its obsession with follower numbers and traffic, evolving to context-driven reputation systems and algorithms.

Interest Graphs will be used to build Better Social Graphs. Today’s monolithic Interest Graph will get further specialized into Taste Graphs, Financial Graphs, Local Network Graphs, etc., yielding higher relevance for different needs.

The Age of Relevance beckons!

Luckily for Halstead, Twitter let him know their button-killer was coming and gave Tweetmeme a chance to get out of the way. Twitter even agreed to license some of Tweetmeme’s technology and enter into a business agreement with them about the button. The phrase, “killing me softly” comes to mind.

Halstead shared a bit more about the experience in a FriendFeed (yes, it’s still around) conversation during The Gillmor Gang taping today. “Yes we lost 20% at first – but we have continued to grow. Twitter [is] growing even faster, the whole point was to make the ‘whole’ ecosystem grow faster,” Halstead noted. He says that despite the huge plunge in button impressions, they didn’t lose a lot of sites sending them data in the grand scheme of things. “We’re still at 220,000 sites,” Halstead said. He then reiterated that they were still growing, and revealed that part of the agreement was “not to suddenly switch everyone from one button to another.“

“We never made a penny from buttons, but we made Twitter grow,” Halstead noted. “More links = more links for us to filter + sell the data for,” he continued. And data is the key behind Tweetmeme’s new post-button strategy with Datasift, the new product they’re working on.

Today on their blog, URL shortening service Bit.ly unveiled a cute new feature: Clickabit. It’s a Twitter account that surfaces some of the “surprising and bizarre” links being shortened and shared across their network. But the feature also hints at something we’ve been talking about for a while: Bit.ly Now.

“We’re currently hard at work on several systems that will expose some of the interesting data we’re playing with. In the meantime, we’d like to introduce @clickabit,” Bit.ly writes in the post. They key part is obviously the first half. We’ve known for a while that Bit.ly has been planning some sort of service to expose the best links being shared across the web — kind of like Tweetmeme or Digg. But Bit.ly links are shared on email and Facebook too; it would be about more than Twitter.

Actually, Bit.ly Now has existed for sometime — on Twitter. But today, Bit.ly switched that account over to be the Clickabit one (the old tweets from 2009 when Bit.ly was using the account to surface popular Bit.ly links have been transfered over as well — and they have yet to change the bio from the Bit.ly Now one). They still control the @bitlynow account, and have switched the icon. The only tweet from the account now reads “Follow the puffer fish to @clickabit!“

It would seem that they’re finally preparing to do something more with this account. Something like a system to “expose some fo the interesting data we’ve playing with“, perhaps.

It’s an interesting time in the popular link surfacing space. Tweetmeme is in the process of morphing into something else following Twitter’s launch of their own tweet button. Meanwhile, Digg has just launched the latest version of their site (version 4), in an attempt to try and recapture the link sharing crown. Then of course there’s Facebook. That Like button is everywhere.

Slowly but surely, Twitter is taking control of all the key features that make it such a powerful communication medium. Today, it is introducing the Tweet button, a way for Websites to get visitors to share stories and links with one click. Of course, this already exists in various forms, the most popular of which is the Retweet button created by TweetMeme, which is on so many sites (including ours) that it currently generates 750 million impressions a day. Well, that is all very likely going away. “We expect people to switch,” says Tweetmeme founder Nick Halstead, “and we support that.”

Twitter is killing TweetMeme’s Retweet button, but with love. It is licensing some of the technology developed by TweetMeme and has a business agreement in place. However, the code that powers the new Tweet button was written from scratch by Twitter. TweetMeme Pro will continue to exist for Websites that want more customized solutions and analytics, but TweetMeme is shifting is business to a new product that has yet to launch called Datasift, which will focus on curating different realtime streams. From Twitter’s perspective, head of product Jason Goldman says, “We think that there is an experience that we can offer that is more integrated with the Twitter accounts people already have.”

In addition to the the ability to Tweet out links, Twitter’s new button also has another feature. It allows the sites which install them to suggest Twitter accounts to follow, perhaps each site’s official account or the accounts of different writers at blogs and news sites.

The Tweet button is just the latest example of Twitter filling holes in its product by poaching the best ideas from the eco-sytem of startups which have built successful businesses on top of Twitter. The same thing happened with bit.ly and short links and when it decided to create its own official mobile apps for the iPhone (by acquiring Tweetie) and Blackberry. Interestingly, the default link shortener the Tweet button uses is Twitter’s own http://t.co, which could prove to be another blow to bit.ly (although it is technically possible for sites that use bit.ly links to keep doing so).

The message this sends out to Twitter developers is that if they create a successful product, Twitter will absorb it. That is not necessarily a bad thing. At least in this case, Twitter worked with the company it will displace to soften the blow. Halstead says it is not really an issue. “The buttons were never our core business, we make our money from selling filtered data – not from buttons. If buttons made you money we would be very rich.” The value is in the data, which he still gets from Twitter via the firehose, which will power his new product.

Yesterday we showed a teaser of our conversation with Loic Le Meur of Seesmic, and Nick Halstead of Tweetmeme. Here’s the full video, in two parts.

This is a debate around the recent decision by Twitter to compete directly with third party developers who are making Twitter applications that Twitter has deemed to be mere “hole fillers.” A variety of third party apps are now competing directly with Twitter.

Most developers we’ve spoken with are upset, and say that Twitter gave them guidance that they wouldn’t compete with them. And in the past Twitter has been consistent in saying that they want to provide the plumbing for the Twitter ecosystem. Now it’s quite clear that they want to build on top of that plumbing, too.

Halstead seems unworried by the changes. He says that new features in Twitter’s API will allow new types of apps to be built by third parties, and the existing stuff isn’t as relevant (tell that to the guys who’ve just been hit). And his Tweetmeme app isn’t in much danger because he has actual code on tens of thousands of websites. Even if Twitter competed directly, it would be hard to get publishers to replace that code.

My chief rebuttal to Halstead is that the new API features, such as geo, are great. But developers building around those features are simply providing the research & development effort to figure out what works. Once they do, Twitter will call them hole fillers and compete directly.

Loic Le Meur has been all over the place on this. He said Twitter would never compete. They he said he knew all along they’d compete. More recently he just yelled “Fuck You” at everyone.

He says Seesmic will be able to continue to compete because (1) Seesmic is focused on more than just Twitter, and (2) Twitter has promised to only use the same APIs in their apps that they provide to developers.

That troubles me, too, and I use a Windows/Office analogy in the debate. The Office team theoretically only uses the same tools to build on Windows that everyone else does. But they have special access, and an official stamp of approval, and countless other advantages that make it impossible for anyone to build an Office suite on top of Windows effectively.

John Borthwick has been the most effective at communicating the problem from the developer standpoint. Developers need to know the rules that Twitter is playing by. Calling something a hole filler after the fact isn’t reasonable.

Lastly, talk about holes and filling holes in platforms is misleading at best. Take a list of emerging to mature companies — great companies … Is Groupon a hole in Facebook? Facebook a hole in Google?? Google is a hole in Microsoft??? Microsoft in IBM???? Maybe it’s holes all the way down? Innovation — building great companies — is about finding, filling and even creating holes.

John also said something similar in a comment to a TechCrunch post a couple of days ago:

Over the past few years a set of platforms have emerged online that give startup’s a foundation to get a kick start to building their audience and/or their business. Adsense/Adwords were probably the first scaled examples of this. And as these platforms mature its important for their to be clear boundaries between what the platform provider does and doesnt do. Granted these boundaries shift over time — but they have to be sustained for long enough for the platform provider to achieve scale and trust and to get a critical mass of applications running on it. To play out the Google example take the UX of Google. They understood they werent in the content business — they were in the navigation business. Now after 10 years the line is getting hazy in some areas — this is why the local search stuff, the yelp conversations resonate with people — Google has for what ever reason decided that local is something it needs to wrap more of an arm around local. How long is that arm? How detrimental is it to local players? im not sure? — but if i had to put a dollar down I would bet that Yelp and say Opentable etc. will do just fine. So — clear sustained boundaries are necessary. The second point is that people bootstrapping on these platforms should also try to spread their relevance — beyond the underlying platform –so yelp should extend its business model beyond adsense, zynga beyond facebook etc. etc. That is what Stocktwits has done, same for bit.ly, Tweetdeck, Someecards, OMGpop etc… all of these services have a leg in multiple platforms.

At some level — one person’s innovation is clearly another persons hole. Take a list of emerging to mature companies — great companies … Is Groupon a hole in Facebook??? Facebook a hole in Google?? Google is a hole in Microsoft. Microsoft in IBM?? It’s holes all the way down (or up) — thats much of what innovation is. After 30yrs of personal computing history we have a lot of platform history to draw from, Apple understands this very well, so does Google, so does Amazon, so does Ebay. Once again — great businesses will emerge out of these new and emerging platforms.

That, to me, is the key issue. Twitter is now making a new set of promises to developers. Will they break that promise too in a year or two? Maybe it doesn’t matter. Halstead says in the video that the opportunity is too large to ignore, damn the risks. Perhaps that’s so. But it seems like the best developers may choose to spend their time on something else, where they don’t run the risk of Twitter changing their mind again.

Update: Full video is here.

We had Loic Le Meur of Seesmic, and Nick Halsted of Tweetmeme at TechCrunch today to talk about the ongoing Twitter developer ecosystem story. It was a fairly contentious discussion as we tried to wade through all the b.s. and get to the meat of the story.

We’ll post the full video tomorrow, but here’s a teaser where I debate Loic on whether or not he saw the direct competition coming. I’ve been critical of his changing position on the matter.

This is such a fascinating discussion, because most developers are publicly playing along, but privately trashing Twitter as having misled them into thinking that they wouldn’t compete with their third party developers. Loic finally answers the question directly at around 2 minutes into the clip, and that’s when the discussion gets interesting.

You know how TweetMeme started out trying to be the Techmeme of Twitter before it ventured off plastering its ReTweet buttons on every blog on the Web? Well now there’s a site that just launched today that wants to be the TweetMeme of Google Buzz called ReBuzzThis.

It is not much to look at right now—five lame links as of this writing. But the site wants to encourage blogs and other sites to add its ReBuzz buttons to posts and articles. The posts that get ReBuzzed the most shoot up the homepage just like on TweetMeme with ReTweets. Except that TweetMeme tries to count all retweets, not just those done through its buttons. ReBuzzThis seems to only count Rebuzzes done through its site and buttons, so it is not really capturing the most Buzzed about articles and posts.

But it may be onto something. One of the top feature requests on Google Buzz is a Rebuzz button. So we may see an official version of ReBuzzThis come out on Google Buzz itself.

Toyota has been dealing with negative backlash from the massive safety recalls of its vehicles; and is even suffering in terms of sales. So what does the company do to repair its image? Turn to Twitter, of course! The Japanese auto giant has launched a branded channel on TweetMeme, in partnership with Federated Media, which aggregates and organize Twitter conversations regarding Toyota.

Called Toyota Conversations, the site brings together the top stories being Tweeted about Toyota, from news articles to press releases. The site also shows visitors the most popular videos and images being shared about Toyota on Twitter. And the channel includes a Featured Tweets from Toyota’s Twitter account and press room as well as AdTweets, which are Tweetmeme’s retweetable ads for Toyota.

You may notice after taking a look at all of the top stories that are being aggregated on the site, that most of the news is positive. That doesn’t seem to match the general tone of the media writing about Toyota, which has been quick to criticize the car company for its manufacturing mistakes. If you take a look at Twitter sentiment app Tweetfeel, the sentiment of Tweets mentioning Toyota lean more negative. Tweetmeme channels can be set up to pick up only certain news sources. It looks like Toyota picked the friendlier ones.

That being said, it’s definitely interesting to see such a high-profile company taking to Twitter to try to reform its image by engaging directly in a dialogue with consumers. As we’ve seen with the recent Southwest/Kevin Smith incident, Twitter is influencing public relations in unprecedented ways. Now more than ever, brands are flocking to Twitter to not only monitor and track what’s being said about their company on Twitter but to influence and participate in the conversation.

Photo Credit/Flickr/JoelZimmer

Now that Twitter did away with its monolithic Suggested User List, everyone can fight for followers on a more equal footing. Tweetmeme wants to help you gain followers with a new Follow Button you can place on your blog or Website. It looks very much like Tweetmeme’s ReTweet button, which is on 100,000 sites and registering 7 billion monthly impressions across the web, except it says “Follow” instead of “Retweet.” When you click on the Follow button, a window pops open that lets you sign into Twitter and follow the account tied to the button (usually the person or publication of the site the button is on).

The Follow button comes in different shapes and sizes, shows how many followers you have, and is tied into analytics services such as TwitterCounter, Twitalyzer, and TwitterGrader. The data from the Follow button should also appear in Tweetmeme’s own analytics. But it doesn’t yet. The Follow buttons are geared more towards advertisers, and indeed they can and will be placed in ads as well as on editorial content. Tweetmeme is also working on turning its ReTweet button into an advertising platform with AdTweets.

Follow buttons are nothing new, but Tweetmeme has a lot of distribution muscle with its Retweet buttons. The question is, how many buttons are you going to gunk up your site with? Should we add a follow button to every post?

As you can see on this Flippa page, the current bids for Retweet.com stand at $20,000. This is a huge increase from yesterday when the bids hovered around $10. So far, there are 27 bids. The listing on the site claims the domain gets 12 million uniques a month, and 26 million pageviews. If that’s the case, you have to wonder, why sell?

Well part of the reason has to be that Twitter itself is trying to trademark the word “retweet.” Mesiab Labs was also apparently tried to trademark the name, though it’s not clear if that failed or if they are simply moving to sell before that happens. Twitter also tried unsuccessfully to trademark “tweet” last year.

We also asked Mesiab Labs about the auction. Here’s what they had to say:

When we initially conceptualized Retweet.com, we realized the importance of the new shift that social media sites like Twitter are making on how we filter and consume news.  We developed and fostered Retweet.com and its resulting network to help explore this concept. It has been quite exciting to see stories break before some of the major news media outlets and to watch blogs gain near mainstream status.  It’s also exciting to watch the pulse of the social world shift and sway.  But more than novelty, we are demonstrating incredible new ways to apply crowd-sourcing to answer the question ”What matters, right now.”

There are some truly remarkable things about the term ReTweet. First, as we all know it was created by the users of Twitter – NOT by the Twitter itself. Second, like “Googling” something has become synonymous with using a search engine, “Retweet’ing” has become synonymous with the act of spreading online content virally.

While we aren’t the only ones in this space, we feel privileged to participate.

Now that we’ve grown and scaled the Retweet network and infrastructure, we’re ready to pass it on to someone who can truly push it to the next level. We’re excited about the opportunity for a new passionate owner to foster and grow Retweet.com and continue to tap the potential of what is undeniably becoming a monumental shift in news consumption.

They go on to note that if they don’t find a suitable buyer in 30 days, they’ll continue to operate the site themselves. It is a pretty killer domain, but is it worth the risk if Twitter gets the trademark?

There are lies, damned lies, and statistics, as Mark Twain once said. A couple days ago, I wrote a post titled, “What Happened To bit.ly’s Market Share” after I noticed some new statistics on TweetMeme which suggested that the market share for short URLs has shifted in the past few months and is actually diversifying as more and more short URLs inundate the Web.

John Borthwick, the investor who incubated bit.ly and then spun it off from betaworks, didn’t like that headline because it called into question bit.ly’s continued dominance. He also didn’t like it because there was a problem with the underlying statistics. Previously, the TweetMeme stats showed only the top 5 URL shortening services in a given 24-hour period. But then TweetMeme took down the stats for a couple months while it reworked the underlying architecture to better scale with the incredible growth in these kinds of links. When the stats quietly came back over the holidays, they looked different. Instead of bit.ly showing a 70 to 80 percent share of shortened links on Twitter, it only had 56 percent (today it’s at 58 percent).

One reason for the change was that TweetMeme was counting differently. It now included “other” as a category, whereas before it only showed the relative share of the top five players. Indeed, if you look at relative share, bit.ly is still in the mid-70s. Borthwick pointed this out to me privately via email and I corrected the post. It was something that I missed, but I wasn’t the only one who missed it. Borthwick and Andrew Cohen at bit.ly missed it when I ran the numbers by them prior to posting, and even TweetMeme’s Nick Halstead didn’t catch it. In fact, he told me the data was comparable.

I added the correction but didn’t change the headline because it was still a valid question. The numbers had changed.  Why?   Borthwick still wasn’t happy, so he wrote his own post this morning with a deliberately misleading headline (“charting the real time web OR the curious tale of how TechCrunch traffic inexplicably fell off a cliff in December”) to make his displeasure known. Duly noted. Of course, the headline got the post on Techmeme even though you have to get halfway through the post to find out “I actually don’t have any data to suggest that happened.” Borthwick also offered some of bit.ly’s own data suggesting that it still has a 68.6 percent share of total short links on Twitter (see his table below).

Now 68 percent does sound better than 58 percent., and it’s pretty darn close to the 70% bit.ly constantly cites as its market share. But here’s the thing. Borthwick’s data is based on something known as the Twitter “garden hose.” It is a trickle of data that is a sample of the Tweets going through the service.  You can see that by looking at the number of occurrences for each short URL: 4,193 for bit.ly, 6,112 for all of them.  TweetMeme’s stats are based on a much bigger set of data: the so-called “firehose.”  After filtering for only Tweets with links in them, TweetMeme’s stats are based on more than 3 million Tweets a day.  I think I’ll go with TweetMeme’s numbers, but God bless Borthwick for trying to put his company in the best light.

Yes, the numbers changed. But now we know that bit.ly’s market share was never 80 percent to begin with.  That’s not to say that bit.ly is not growing like gangbusters. It is—bit.ly went from shortening 12 million links to more than 2 billon in a year.  But so is the rest of the market, which is diversifying and fragmenting as new short-link domains inundate the Web, including ones which are not general-purpose link shorteners but rather tied to specific sites or apps, such as goo.gl or wp.me (WordPress). We can argue about statistics all we want. The more interesting question is can bit.ly continue to dominate? For the record, I actually think they have a good shot.

It seems like everyone and their mother now has their own URL shortening service, or at least their own short domain. Short URLs have almost become a branding thing. But as the use of short links keeps going up, the market share among different URL shortening services is fragmenting. The biggest URL shortening service is still bit.ly, with more than 2 billion links a month, but it now only has a 56 percent market share of short links on Twitter, compared to nearly 80 percent last summer. The drop wasn’t noticed before because TweetMeme, which keeps statistics on short URL market share, pulled its stats page for a couple months as part of a site upgrade to make it more scalable. But now that stats page is back up, and it is tracking 3.1 million unique links per day compared to 2.5 million last November..

So what accounts for bit.ly’s 24-point drop?  When TinyURL was the default service on Twitter it had a 75 percent share, and now it has only 8 percent, so these things can shift quickly.  But bit.ly  is still the default link shortener on Twitter.com and many Twitter clients such as Tweetdeck.  Some of the decline can be attributed to the launch of bit.ly Pro, which is a white-labeling short link service for publishers.  We use it to publish links to our posts on Twitter with our tcrn.ch domain, which used to be bit.ly links.  Even though bit.ly is still powering those links, it doesn’t get credit for any custom domains.  In fact, tcrn.ch is now one of the top 100 short domains (see below). So to the extent that large publishers such as AOL, Bing, foursquare, the Huffington Post, Meebo, MSN, and the New York Times switched to custom bit.ly Pro domains, those are no longer counted for bit.ly in the stats above.

I should also mention that these stats represent only a 24-hour snapshot and they are only for Twitter (but Twitter is where the lion’s share of these short links are being passed around). And TweetMeme is now including things like tumblr.com and Justin.tv.  Bit.ly says that its own analysis of Twitter’s “garden hose” of Tweets (which is a more limited sample) shows that it is maintaining a 70-to-80 percent share.

Getting back to the TweetMeme stats, if you look at bit.ly’s biggest competitor, it is not TinyURL (7.88%), ow.ly (3.92%), is.gd (3.05%), or tumblr.com (2.79%), it is “Other” (26.58%).  TweetMeme provided me with a breakdown of the top 100 URL shorteners and their respective shares (see table below).  And while some of them are bit.ly Pro accounts, they still don’t add up to bit.ly’s former share.  What you see is just a lot more competition, from youtu.be, Goog.le, yfrog.com, Facebook’s fb.me, MySpace’s lnk.ms (which is down significantly from last September when it was No. 2), ping.fm, and StumbleUpon’s Su.pr.  Here is the the full top 100 list.  I’ve bolded some interesting names.  Note that 4sq.com (No. 27) has twice the share of gowal.la (No. 35) and five times that of loopt.us (No. 59).  In live video, ustre.am (no. 28) is ahead of justin.tv (No. 37).  And flic.kr (no. 31) and digg.com (No. 33) are further down the list than you might expect.  Also, the data in the table below is from yesterday, so it is slightly different from the chart above which is from today and formspring.me is No. 6 in the table because it got some attention yesterday and a lot of people were trying it out.

Update: The mystery of bit.ly’s seemingly shrinking market share may have been solved. TweetMeme’s stats now show absolute market share and that “other” category. Before, it only showed relative share of the top five URL shorteners. If you calculate the new numbers by relative share of the top five, bit.ly would still have about 75 percent. But it also means its absolute share was never that high to begin with. Another factor here is that Tweetmeme now includes short links from more than strictly URL shortening services such as form Youtube, Google, and WordPress, which only shorten their own links. The bigger point remains that the market is diversifying.

Top 100 URL Shorteners On Twitter

Editor’s note: As the capital markets heat up and the economy continues to rebound, the deal flow is starting to open up again. We’ve already given you our top ten IPO candidates for 2010. In this guest post, Kelly Porter, an M&A expert at Woodside Capital Partners, proposes ten digital media deals he’d like to see. None of the companies mentioned in this editorial are clients of Woodside Capital Partners.

Digital media M&A activity is expected to pick up in 2010—big acquirers have significant cash on their balance sheets, share prices are up, and many good acquisition candidates are on the landscape. With this in mind, I’ve put together the following list of 10 interesting Digital Media M&A deals for 2010. Some are longshots, some are slam dunks; all would create compelling new opportunities and possibilities. It’s a list that was compiled in recent weeks over coffee with some of the brightest and most connected folks in the valley. Without further ado, here are the deals we envisioned:

1. Google acquires Roku

YouTube arguably holds the highest potential of Google’s major growth initiatives, capturing about 38% of video viewing on the web and serving more than 1 billion streams daily. However, the average YouTube user watches about five hours of TV daily versus only 15 minutes of YouTube. Moreover, consumers face a firehose of difficult-to-find viewing options on the YouTube site, with some 20 hours of content uploaded to YouTube every minute. Most important, Google is having trouble monetizing all that video content and YouTube is bleeding significant red ink. Roku would address all these issues plus extend the YouTube brand – via Roku’s set-top box. The Roku box currently streams content from sites like Netflix and Amazon VOD to a consumer’s television. Google could rebrand and supercharge the box with lots of cool new search features, interactivity, gaming, PVR functionality, a tier of Google-branded channels featuring popular YouTube content, plus add several tiers of channels from major studios, broadcast networks and cable networks. A freemium model could be deployed, with subscribers getting most content for free, and paying extra for premium tiers. Google could grow a potentially huge new revenue stream, plus the service would be a formidable competitor to the rumored Apple broadband TV service (Apple is reportedly talking to Disney and CBS about supplying content for the service). Some might say that Microsoft already tried this with WebTV; however WebTV never had the massive cross-promotion engines of YouTube and Google behind it.

2. Cisco acquires LinkedIn

Cisco’s pursuit of enterprise communications is important, and LinkedIn would be a natural and powerful extension of this strategy. LinkedIn is growing like wildfire, having nearly doubled its user base in the past two years and launched hot partnerships with companies like Microsoft, RIM and Twitter. Cisco’s acquisitions of WebEx, Tandberg, Jabber and PostPath would be augmented by LinkedIn’s 53 million members globally, and some very cool and unique new applications could be created using the combined capabilities of LinkedIn and Cisco’s various divisions. LinkedIn’s estimated 2010 revenues are just over $200M and the company’s last fundraising came in 2008, with a valuation of approximately $1 billion. For Cisco, with a $138 billion market cap and $35 billion in cash and short-term equivalents, acquiring LinkedIn for a big premium to the company’s most recent valuation (which is what it would take to acquire LinkedIn) would use a relatively small amount of that cash and would create a meaningful strategic extension for Cisco in the social networking domain.

3. Fox Interactive Media / MySpace acquires Pandora

As many music services struggle, Pandora has reportedly skyrocketed to 40 million registered users and is adding 600,000 new users per week. Pandora has become a bona fide internet behemoth, accounting for a reported 44% of internet radio listening, with half of that listening coming on mobile devices. One of MySpace’s great strengths is the social network’s music presence. In recent months, FIM/MySpace acquired imeem and iLike, but those acquisitions pale in comparison to a potential Pandora acquisition. A MySpace-Pandora combination would create formidable scale which would span multiple segments of the music industry—from coffee shop singer/songwriters to arena rock bands—and provide benefits to music consumers that are not available elsewhere. Pandora would also breathe new life into the MySpace brand, which has been lagging in the wake of Facebook.

4. Twitter acquires Twithawk, TweetMeme, bizz.ly, Skout and TwitJump

Some believe Twitter should sell to a larger company, but they are missing the greater opportunity.  Twitter enjoys massive potential as a standalone company. It is reminiscent of Yahoo! in 1995—a single compelling product, lots of traffic, growth potential and buzz, and poised to dominate several markets—in this case, the markets surrounding all things realtime. These five acquisitions—although all young companies themselves—would extend Twitter in significant ways: business marketing (Twithawk); realtime news discovery and sharing (TweetMeme); realtime promotion, publishing and sharing (bizz.ly); realtime dating/connecting (Skout); and Twitter management tools (TwitJump). Twitter could organically grow these new capabilities from within, but acquiring them through M&A would be faster and would also bring new talent into the company. Most important, these markets would bring new revenues to Twitter, extend its network effects, and broaden its footprint—ultimately positioning the company more favorably for a public offering.

5. Netflix acquires Flixster

Flixster—the movie-info sharing site with about 50 million unique users and a robust social networking core—is a near-perfect strategic fit for Netflix, providing both a marketing benefit as well as a critical social networking component. Netflix, with about 12 million subscribers (up about 28% from a year ago) is spending an attention-getting $27 per subscriber in acquisition costs. Flixster would help bring these subscriber acquisition costs down through its web presence, connection to Facebook and MySpace, and strength on the iPhone, where Flixster is the #1 movie app. Netflix’s future growth lies in adding new subscribers as well as increasing revenue from existing subscribers, and the company’s 17,000-title instant streaming service is a critical strategic component for its future; Flixster would be a core component in growing all of Netflix’s revenue streams. Rumors are recently afloat that Fox Interactive Media / MySpace is eyeing an acquisition of Flixster, but that deal is apparently not imminent. While there is indeed good strategic fit between Fox and Flixster, a Netflix-Flixster deal feels like an even better one.

6. Ticketmaster acquires Eventbrite

Eventbrite would be an excellent addition to the Ticketmaster portfolio, providing Ticketmaster with a new consumer market and Eventbrite with a deep-pocketed corporate parent that offers unparalleled distribution and marketing opportunities. Eventbrite enables an online presence for marketing and ticket sales for fairs, festivals, fundraisers and other events, rocketing from fledgling start-up in 2006 to projected 2009 sales of over $100 million, 3 million monthly uniques and 10,000 new monthly events. Ticketmaster’s savvy CEO Irving Azoff has shown great adeptness in growing revenues from $1.0 billion to nearly $1.5 billion in just the past four years, along with building substantial increases in the company’s free cash flow. Azoff would bring world-class managerial knowhow to Eventbrite’s high-volume, low-margin business. Ticketmaster has had its hands full seeking approval of the Live Nation merger; assuming that merger succeeds in early 2010, Eventbrite would be a solid next step in the company’s strategic growth. Editor’s update: Azoff didn’t became CEO of Ticketmaster until early 2009. From 2006 to 2009, Sean Moriarty ran the division.

7. DirecTV acquires Blip.tv

Comcast’s TV Everywhere online initiative—which features about 12,000 titles from about 30 major content providers—was a shot across DirecTV’s bow and pointed to the need for DirecTV to launch a successful online distribution initiative. Blip.tv offers DirecTV an immediate and valuable distribution channel for online broadcast, plus access to thousands of other programming assets from independent producers (which possibly could be used to program one or more unique channels on the DirecTV satellite TV service). Blip.tv currently manages 50,000+ shows and 3 million+ episodes. Views of Blip.tv programming have reportedly more than doubled in the past year, exceeding 85 million views during December 2009. The company has also attracted an impressive roster of advertisers including AT&T, Best Buy, Nikon, Chevy, Scion, Canon and Samsung. Blip.tv’s offering would need to be modified to distribute programming from major TV networks on DirecTV’s behalf (in order to limit distribution of those programs to DirecTV viewers), but that would likely not be a difficult modification to undertake. This would extend the audience reach for both companies.

8. Bing/Microsoft acquires Bit.ly

Bit.ly’s utility as a URL-shortener is far eclipsed by the strategic value the company brings to search: in November bit.ly shortened some 2 billion URL’s on Twitter, Facebook, email, instant messages and blogs, which means that the company has one of the best windows into realtime search across the internet. Twitter is often mentioned as the most likely acquirer of bit.ly, but an acquisition by Bing is even more compelling given the importance of realtime search to big search engines. Bing has gained impressive market share in the overall search market, but lags in realtime search. Bit.ly has grown out of nowhere in just the past two years to be one of the dominant companies in the social web. Given the growing importance of bit.ly, it would not be surprising to see a heated bidding war between Facebook, Twitter, Google and Microsoft. A key mitigating factor is that Google and Facebook have recently rolled-out URL shorteners of their own.

9. Bing/Microsoft Acquires Foursquare

Called “Next Year’s Twitter”, Foursquare is a fantastically addictive and cool mobile startup that enables a person to share his location with a group of friends. Each time the person checks in from a particular location he or she earns a badge, and the person that checks in most from a particular location becomes the location’s “Mayor.”  It’s this addictive game quality that has Foursquare growing exponentially, a la Twitter. This is a natural add-on to Bing Maps, and would further extend Microsoft into the social web with a mobile extension carrying significant ad sales and promotional opportunities. Given that Foursquare is one of the most exciting private companies on the digital mediascape, the company would command a big premium. Google is another natural acquirer of Foursquare, but a Google-Foursquare tie-up is less likely because of events surrounding the acquisition of Dodgeball, and the team subsequently fleeing Google to create Foursquare.  Twitter could also acquire Foursquare.

10. LinkedIn acquires Yammer

Yammer is Twitter for the enterprise and has grown rapidly since its September 2008 launch, attracting 50,000 enterprise members so far. Yammer would be an ideal extension of LinkedIn’s reach into the enterprise and would provide new revenue to LinkedIn via its freemium model (companies pay $3 to $5 a head when they upgrade to a premium account). Given Yammer’s market traction and compelling model, it is likely that other enterprise-related suitors like Salesforce.com and Oracle would also step-up in a bidding process for Yammer.

Topicfire is what co-founder Ryan Sit calls a “realtime hot news aggregator.” It uses what the service dubs its “HeatRank” to rate any particular story on a 1 to 10 scale, with 10 representing the hottest stories. These stories are broken up into dozens of categories so users can drill down to find just what they want, and easily sort the stream to find just the hottest stories.

For example, Sit likes to read about coffee, but there was no good aggregator of that news on the web. With Topicfire, there is. There’s also a page for beer news. And bacon news. And of course, they also offer the bigger topics that are tradtionally aggregated, such as the aforementioned tech news, and celebrity news.

But what’s nice about Topicfire is that it’s very simple. The main page is a single stream of news that is updated in realtime as certain stories from thousands of sources around the web get hot. This hotness is determined not by links (part of what Techmeme uses) or votes (what Digg uses) or retweets (which Tweetmeme uses), but instead mostly by comments on the originating site itself.

Topicfire looks at every site they pull in content from and rates individual posts based on the comments they are getting in a set amount of time versus the average posts on that site. This creates the HeatRank. They are also looking at retweets as a backup, but as they note, those aren’t really a good indicator of popularity beyond tech news. The main page and each topic page has a slider along the top to allow users to easily filter which content they want to see on the 1 to 10 scale.

Perhaps even better is that Topicfire is great at highlighting popular stories by making their images dynamic. That is to say, if a story is really hot, it may have an image in the stream that is the full width of the stream. If it’s less popular, it may just have a thumbnail view. This is something which is an obvious but natural visiual cue to let a reader know that one story is more important that another one.

Another nice element of Topicfire is that it’s entirely built on top of Facebook Connect. This means there is no new service to sign up for, you simply log-in with your Facebook account and you’re done. If you comment on an item or like it, this all gets sent back to your Facebook profile. “We want to be the news for Facebook,” Sit says.

That said, Topicfire also easily allows yout to tweet out any story you find on the site as well with the click of a button.

So why use something like this over an RSS reader? Well that should be obvious. Most people still don’t get that concept, nor do they necessarily want to see every single story from every single source, there’s just not enough time to read that all. Topicfire takes the RSS feed for these thousands of sites and breaks it up into the hottest items. They use both rssCloud and Pubsubhubbub to pull in these feeds in realtime.

Unlike Techmeme, the only human curation done on Topicfire is the picking on sources and topics. Eventually, the team may crowdsource both of those as well. Google News is also all algorithm-based, but it’s often severly lacking when it comes to breaking news — which again, is the main focus of Topicfire.

Topicfire is launching its first iteration today. Down the road, they hope to add elements such as an iPhone app that would allow them to alert users when a new story they are interested in is breaking. They also plan to create a comprehensive search element, and open an API so others can pull in their data.

At our Realtime CrunchUp in San Francisco today, TweetMeme founder Nick Halstead has unveiled AdTweets. As you might expect, this involves ads that appear on your site — but with the addition of a retweet button. Yes, you can also retweet these ads just as you would any piece of content.

The idea seems like an obvious one for the company. It’s similar to what Digg is doing with its Digg ads, where users can vote on advertisements just as they would with regular content. The difference here is that you would be sending an ad to your contacts on Twitter. Is anyone really going to want to do that? And if they do, will their contacts start unfollowing them?

But the idea here is clearly not to share just any ad, but rather ads that have the potential to go viral — particularly video ads. And TweetMeme already has a big partner on board. They’ve just announced that they cut a deal with Federated Media in two weeks time. With this partnership, their button can be added into any standard advertisement that FM allows.

The tweeting out of ads or sponsored links has long been a controversial thing. Some are convinced this is a great way to make money, while others consider this absolutely pure spam. It’s an interesting play, to say the least. If TweetMeme is able to spread this idea the way they’ve spread their button, they’re going to make a ton of money.

AdTweets will launch in 2 weeks.

Joel Strellner, who started the project, finally put Twitturly up for sale on Flippa ten days ago, and the auction just ended. Only five bids came in, and the sale ultimately netted no more than $8,500 – Strellner was hoping for double that amount.

Now, to be fair, Strellner has moved on to other things in the past few months and acknowledges that little attention has been paid to the service for a while, but the low selling price is still undeniably a bit of a bummer for him and his team. Despite a PageRank 6 and an Alexa rank of 40,106, Twitturly only attracted about 1,000 unique visitors per day, and that’s not even enough to warrant anyone to start thinking about monetization.

It’s unclear who the winning bidder is, but he or she is getting the codebase for the site, one month of support from Strellner, some domain names and 622 GB of data.

Over the past few weeks, it’s definitely been crunchtime as we’ve been putting together the panels and demos for our Realtime CrunchUp on November 20 in San Francisco. After much back and forth, and with the help of our Realtime Board, we finally have an agenda we are very excited to present (see below). Get your tickets here.

Speakers will include Twitter COO Dick Costolo, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Facebook VP of Product Chris Cox, Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley, angel investor Ron Conway, FriendFeed co-founders (and now-Facebook VPs) Paul Buchheit and Bret Taylor. The CrunchUp will take place at the Intercontinental Hotel in San Francisco and will kick off with a big roundtable discussion and one-on-one interviews, followed by startup demos and panel discussions drilling down into geo streams, media streams, marketing, and venture capital.

If there is anything that is capturing the attention and excitement of the technology community right now, it is realtime streams. Twitter, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and startups galore are all active in the realtime Web and will be at the event. Nearly 40 startups applied to fill ten demo slots for new realtime product launches.

But as more of us immerse ourselves in our Twitter and Facebook streams, and Foursquare check-ins, the need to filter out the noise is becoming acute. That will be a big theme, and we’ll hear about different approaches to do that ranging from better user interfaces to better realtime search. We are also seeing the emergence of new types of streams, particularly geo streams that tell everyone where you are at any given moment, and media streams that inject photos, videos, and other content beyond text into the the realtime conversation.

The CrunchUp will explore both the technological side of the phenomenon and the business side. These streams represent a new communications layer across the Web, as well as a platform for building products and startups. Come join us to find out where the stream is going next.

If you feel like your company can add to the few holes left in the agenda, please contact us at realtime [at] techcrunch [dot] com. Bloggers and journalists can request a press pass by contacting Daniel Brusilovsky.

The CrunchUp also provides an amazing sponsorship platform for start-ups and brands to reach both conference and networking attendees. Please contact Heather Harde or Jeanne Logozo to learn more about sponsorship packages and custom opportunities.

CRUNCHUP AGENDA

9:00 – 9:30 AM From RSS To Realtime: A Conversation With Twitter COO Dick Costolo

9:30 – 11:00 AM Roundtable: Filtering The Stream. Getting Rid of the Noise.

Facebook, VP of Product Chris Cox
Google, Google Fellow, Amit Singhal
Seesmic, CEO Loic Le Meur
Futurity Ventures, investor/entrepreneur Edo Segal
CrowdEye, CEO Ken Moss
Microsoft, GM of FUSE Labs, Lili Cheng
Facebook, VP of Platform, Bret Taylor
Thing Labs/Brizzly, CEO Jason Shellen
Angel Investor Ron Conway
MySpace, Chief Product Officer Jason Hirschhorn

11:00 – 11:15 AM Break

11:15 – 11:45 AM The Social Enterprise: A Conversation With Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff

11:45 – 12:30 PM Where Is The Stream Going? Tomorrow’s Killer Apps (Demos)

Hot Potato (event streams, launch)
Seesmic (a special surprise)
StatusNet (DIY microblogging, launch)
Stealth Startup (RT social address book)
Realtime Pitch From The Audience*

12:30 – 2:00 PM Lunch

2:00 – 2:45 PM Where Is The Stream Going? Tomorrow’s Killer Apps (Demos)

PlyMedia (new product launch)
Stealth Startup (live video streams)
Stealth Startup (RT news streams)
Tweetmeme (new product launch)
Rippol (video streams, public launch)
Stealth Startup (mobile noise assassin)
Realtime Pitch From the Audience*

2:45 – 3:30 PM Media Streams: Are These The Ultimate Marketing Vehicles?
DailyBooth, co-founder Ryan Amos
Ad.ly, CEO Sean Rad
Hollywood agent, Robin Bechtel (digital strategist for Britney Spears, Warner Bros. Records)
more
NewTek, SVP strategic development Philip Nelson

3:30 – 3:45 Break

3:45 – 4:30 Geo Streams: We Know Where You Are, Right Now
Foursquare, VP business development Tristan Walker
Twitter, director of platform Ryan Sarver
Google, Steve Lee, Group Product Manager Google Maps for Mobile and Google Latitude
SimpleGeo, founder Matt Galligan
Hot Potato, founder Justin Shaffer
Mixer Labs, CEO Elad Gil

4:30 – 5:00 Can We Kill Email Already? All Aboard The Micro-Message Bus
A discussion with Paul Buchheit (Facebook/Friendfeed/Gmail) and Rob Goldman, CEO Threadsy

5:00 – 5:45 PM Where The Realtime Rubber Meets The Road: When Does The Serious Money Come In?

Angel investor, Ron Conway
Microsoft, corporate VP for Strategic and Emerging Business Development, Dan’l Lewin
Charles River Ventures, VC George Zachary
Accel Partners, VC Andrew Braccia
Facebook/Friendfeed, Paul Buchheit

5:45 – 7:30 PM Realtime After Party

Tickets are on sale now. You can still get them for $395. Prices go up to $495 the week before the event.

Topsy is all about the power of the ReTweet on Twitter. When the service first launched publicly in May we noted that ReTweets are the new currency of the web. And it isn’t just the number of retweets that matters (which is subject to large scale spamming efforts). It’s the authority of the people doing the retweeting, too.

One way Topsy is distinguishing itself from competitors like OneRiot and TweetMeme is by holding on to data forever. Most real time search engines are focused on right now, which is exactly what people want. But they dump data periodically, and anyone looking for older stuff won’t be able to find it. Here’s a sample search for “skype andreessen” on OneRiot (4 resutls), TweetMeme (0 results) and Topsy (37 pages of results, which can be sorted and filtered by time). So when you want to look up old Tweets around a link, Topsy has the data that no one else is currently showing.

Topsy TopLinks

Today Topsy is releasing new lists of top links being shared on Twitter at any given time. The product is called Topsy TopLinks. There are lists for the Top 100, Top 1,000 and Top 5,000 links. You can also search within the lists – example.

Users can grab RSS feeds for TopLinks, or even feeds for searches within TopLinks.

Like Bit.ly Now and TweetMeme, Topsy TopLinks is a great way to see what’s hot on Twitter right now. And by using influence they cut out the spammy stuff.

Topsy ReTweet Button

Topsy is now offering a WordPress plugin that gives sites a TweetMeme-like retweet button. And it also shows any badges earned for the URL in TopLinks. Here’s how it looks:

Advanced Query Syntax

Among the other changes at Topsy, the site now supports new advanced search queries.

from: – e.g. ‘from:Topsy influence’

Using this search query will limit your results to links about ‘influence’ that were posted by the Topsy account.

site: – e.g. ‘site:techcrunch.com Topsy’

Using this search query will limit your results to links on the TechCrunch site that are about Topsy.

site: – e.g. ‘site:eu.techcrunch.com twitter’

Using this search query will limit your results to links on the EU version of the TechCrunch site that include the term ‘twitter’.

site: – e.g. ‘site:wired.com/gadgets twitter’

Using this search query will limit your results to links that are within the gadgets section of the the wired.com site and include the term ‘twitter’.

We remain big fans of Topsy. They are amassing a huge long term database of popular links from Twitter, and allowing search and discovery against those links based on advanced search techniques and the idea of influence among Twitter users. The company is based in San Francisco, has 16 employees and has raised $15 million in venture funding.

What does TweetMeme do? They offer other sites a “retweet” button that makes it easy for readers to send story links to Twitter. We use it on all our sites, you can see it on the top right of this post. They also have analytics around tweets sent via the service, and a home page that shows the most retweeted Tweets at any given time. It competes with Digg, TechMeme, Google News and other news aggregators to show breaking news.

But is TweetMeme really so big? The short answer is no.

Comscore tracks 721,000 worldwide monthly unique visitors to TweetMeme. Quantcast says the number is more like 2.4 million. Google Trends barely registers TweetMeme against URL shortener service Bit.ly, which is similar to TweetMeme in some ways.

We believe Compete is simply counting all those javascript widgets that sites like us include on their stories. Which means it’s basically aggregating all of the traffic stats from sites that use TweetMeme. Not so useful.

Why This Matters

Everyone is trying to take real time Twitter data and massage it into a useful, filtered news stream. Bit.ly has a new product on the way called Bit.ly Now. Digg is rebuilding the service from the ground up to take advantage of Twitter data in figuring out what’s hot sooner.

If TweetMeme is really drawing that much traffic, it puts them ahead of Bit.ly and near Digg in total traffic. And that makes them a third contender in an already crowded space.

In the upcoming war between Bit.ly and Digg (and maybe TweetMeme), what matters, besides access to Twitter’s data flow, is the total traffic base to start things off. The ability to index and categorize links on the fly is also important, and all of these companies are working on ways to properly analyze data in milliseconds, which is hard to do properly at scale.

A lot is going to happen in this space in the near future.

TweetMixx, the newly launched service from social voting site Mixx that allows you to find relevant links on Twitter, is venturing into new territory today with the launch of TweetMixx Channels. The service basically lets brands, celebs and companies consolidate their Twitter traffic and mentions on one page.

TweetMixx Channels features branded, customizable pages, with the brand’s current Twitter feed, tweets and updates from fans, and links relevant to content about the brand, company or topic posted automatically. The tool also serves as a tracking and monitoring tool for mentions and conversations about a brand taking place on Twitter.

Companies can create a customizable branded page with a vanity URL and can designate an “Insiders” tab within the channel which has a list of Twittering employees or users associated with a company.

Channels also include a “Chatter” tab that uses a list of search terms relevant to a company or brand to find both tweets and links that contain those terms; a “Links” tab that displays the hyperlinks containing matches to the list of search terms; and a widget to share and link to a brand’s site, blog, Facebook or MySpace page and more. Currently, TweetMixx has branded channels for PC Mag, the Discovery Channel’s Deadliest Catch, Duke University Basketball and others.

It seems prudent for TweetMixx to put their Twitter link discovery platform to good use for brands, as more and more companies and brands look to the microblogging network to engage with consumers. The site serves as a content discovery engine as well. TweetMixx also acts a Twitter client and features filtered search options, which makes it an all-in-one platform for both consumers and companies.

As we’ve said in the past, TweetMixx faces competition from TweetMeme, a popular engine for Twitter link discovery. TweetMeme also features branded channels, with WordPress, AstonMartin, and many others all including channels on TweetMeme’s platform. On TweetMeme’s channels, content is broken down by news, video and images whereas TweetMixx breaks the stream down by the Insiders, general chatter and links. Bit.ly also features analytics and information on links and will soon feature a link discovery engine of their own, but it’s unclear if it will include branded channels.