Now a full 24 hours into the launch of the doomed Retweet.com, how goes it? Quite simply, poorly. This website had more buzz than a beehive under your porch, but somehow has managed to completely miss the mark at converting word of mouth, blogging coverage, and endless Twitter chatter to the one thing that matters: visitors. The company is posing a $10,000 dollar give away of they reach 1,000,000 visitors in 30 days. If you run the math, you will note that it works out to just about 33,000 people per day.
Surely in their first 24 hours, with all the coverage that seemed to explode across all major tech blogs (this one as well, I admit), they did a healthy margin above the 33k they need to average, right? I mean, they had the coverage that every launching website dreams for. At the top, they were being tweeted every two minutes according to Twitter Search. They were everywhere, and were yet no where. Their self reported numbers place them at a mere 21,600 visitors. Here, take a look:
What we have here is, I am gleeful to say, what exactly what I expected. Everyone is quite content with what TweetMeme is doing. Retweet.com, aside from a great domain name, has failed to offer anything new, or even remotely interesting. The jury that has spoken has said one thing quite clearly: yawn. Of course, Retweet.com could turn this around. If they debut great new features, expand their coverage, or land a major partner we might just find ourselves with a real competitor.
However, as it stands, there is only one god, and his name is TweetMeme.
