Does Retweet.com stand a chance if Twitter can co-opt retweets?

August 19, 2009 | Kim-Mai Cutler

Retweet.com, a start-up that makes it easier to share content on Twitter, launched today, adding another player to the very competitive game of accumulating data on shared links inside the social networking site.

Retweet.com works by encouraging people to download a “Retweet” button that they can put on their blog. If your visitors want to share your content, they can click the button and it will load their Twitter account page with a link inside so you can tweet it easily. If thousands or millions of people do this, Retweet can figure out the most popular content of the day or in certain categories and build a search engine incorporating that data.

It’s almost a carbon-copy of Tweetmeme, a U.K.-based service that has soared past 10 million unique visitors a month. (The similarities didn’t go unnoticed either. Tweetmeme accused Mesiab Labs of copying its code last month, prompting Mesiab to take it down.)

Unlike Tweetmeme, this project has a killer name: retweets started as an informal practice on the microblogging network. If you liked what someone else tweeted in 140 characters, you would copy it and add “RT @theirusername” and then repeat whatever they said. It became so widespread that Twitter said they would begin supporting it last Thursday.

All of this begs the question: how valuable can this really be if Twitter can come in and absorb the practice? We saw earlier this week with iLike’s potential firesale to MySpace that businesses with a near-total dependency on other social networks can pay a penalty in their valuations for that risk. Twitter could build it themselves or acquire Tweetmeme, which already has the traction.

Retweet.com comes from Boise, Idaho-based Mesiab Labs LLC. It’s funded by owner Kevin Mesiab.