Tweetmeme arrives to track Twitter's hottest links

UK firm Fav.or.it, a yet-to-launch blog commenting system, has launched a seperate project called Tweetmeme, which will track what’s hot on micro-blogging platform Twitter. As I write on TechCrunch.com today, the business of tracking the online conversation just a got shot in the arm with the tech equivalent of crack cocaine.

Tweetmeme looks for new content and tracks who else is talking about it. It ranks the content based upon who and how much a particular item is being discussed. As anyone knows, the number of URLs which spread virally through Twitter each day must run into the millions, so tracking where that viral trail starts and gains momentum is going to be fascinating. It also categorises the content into blogs / videos / images and audio. Sure there are other Twitter aggregators like Politweets (politics), TweeterBoard (conversation analytics) and many others. But Tweetmeme has a few other features including a ‘river’ of new content and RSS feeds for the river (or categorized feeds for blogs / videos / images / audio). In addition Fav.or.it will integrate Tweetmeme into its API so you’ll be able to comment on blog posts through Tweetmeme. [For an explanation of how Fav.or.it will work see here and here. Favorit won seed funding last month].

The knockout punch is that Tweetmeme will Twitter the original person who first mentioned the item if it makes it onto Tweetmeme. What this means is that Twitter users will get to see if they are the first person to Tweet a cool/hot news URL or not. It’s going to be interesting to see where all this leads.