Is Tweetmeme A Digg Killer?

There have been no shortage of websites and apps that have tried to piggyback on Twitter to capitalize on their huge traffic but most have little or no chance of making any revenue. One site that has every chance to make revenue and in fact become one of the most popular sites in the world within the next 6 months is Tweetmeme.

We all already know and love Digg because it sorts all the best stories on the web and allows users to vote on the best ones to create a great selection of the best user generated content. That worked really well for a couple of years but there were some serious barriers to entry in that you had to create an account and go through the arduous task of submitting stories and it meant that the vast majority of users were self promoters and means that Digg has probably reached it’s peak and will always remain a good site but with a techy audience.

With the rise of Twitter, links are being shared a lot faster and fluidly now but apart from the dreaded hashtag,  good quality links can be hard to find, especially if you are new to the service and don’t have a quality network of friends built up yet who you trust and who will share quality links with you. One of the most powerful tools on Twitter has always been the RT (retweet) which users will use to pass on links of interest they spot to their own followers and it is this phenomenon that Tweetmeme has picked up on to create one of the most useful new sites on the web.

What I love about Tweetmeme is the speed it has taken a simple idea of a RT button and developed it into a fully functional site that brings together all the best content on the web. They have quickly added excellent search, great filtering by subject and the fact that the whole site updates automatically and is like a live living stream is something that excites me massively.

The key differentiator here is that unlike Digg there is no need for people to sign up to submit stories and the fact that it is based on RT’s means that all the spam will automatically be filtered out making Tweetmeme’s job a lot easier. Also take into account that every blog in the world from Techcrunch to Mashable wants to have the Tweetmeme RT button on their site to spread their content virally and you have a massive winner on your hands.

In my opinion Tweetmeme is young enough to be taken out by a competitor like Digg (or indeed by twitter themselves in the same way they took out summize) who have deeper pockets but if they aren’t and it continues to grow you can all expect to be using Tweetmeme a lot more in the future and possibly even using it as your primary source of news and you default homepage.