If you really think it’s not the number of followers on Twitter that counts but how many times stuff gets retweeted, Retweetist might be the right service for you. The application and its corresponding Twitter account are essentially Twitter trend barometers and the work of Mike Sheetal, director of Tokyo-based creative agency UltraSuperNew.
Retweetist distills links, content and users that are being retweeted the most and ranks them according to freshness and frequency (at the moment, the link that has been retweeted the most in the last 24 hours is YelloW cAndy: How to put a Retweet link in your Tweets).
The app also serves as a good guide to see who is creating the most retweeted messages, making it easier to find out which Twitter users are actually worth following. Currently, Mayhemstudios is the user who got retweeted the most (67 times) in the last 24 hours, while TechCrunch got retweeted 26 times. (This feature is more sophisticated than Dan Zarella’s similar Twitter app.)
The most useful part of the service is Retweetist’s own twitter account, which feeds new links that are currently being retweeted the most in Twitter in your tweet stream. Users can follow it to keep up with the key info on Retweetist without accessing the site.
Retweetist is different from Twist, which uses queried terms in Twitter messages to analyze trends. Sheetal says his goal was to extract meaning from Twitter, interpreting the action of retweeting as an act of approval of a message. If you see Twitter as a news source, the application might also work as a real-time ranking system for news that is being tweeted, which would be especially interesting when Twitter users break important world news.
Retweetist is a good tool for hardcore Twitter fans to detect trends and find new users worth following but retweeting would be even more worthwhile if we only could finally get a simple “Retweet this”-function on Twitter itself. We are waiting.
P.S. Retweet this article by clicking here.
