It is a bit morbid to use the word “deadpool” before a product has even launched, but I will be vindicated. Retweet.com, the competitor to TweetMeme is launching in a scant few minutes or hours, depending on when you read this. It will gain some traffic, but will never make a credible threat to the large and powerful Tweetmeme. There are a number of reasons for this, but the first one should be enough to illustrate my point. Allow me to take a screencap from the post my friend Ben Parr wrote this morning about Retweet.com:
Note that the “retweet” button is from TweetMeme and carries nearly 500 retweets. Of course, Mashable is a lucky member of the Twitter Suggest User List, with over 1.2 million Twitter followers, but it raises a different point. TweetMeme has integrated itself into nearly all major and minor blogs in the space of a few months. You will find a similar button at the bottom of this post (click it!). Now, in all honesty I would love to try the new Retweet.com button, and system. However, I feel that it would confuse readers to have two buttons marked “retweet.”
I am only going to use one.
I am going to go with the more established, recognized network that has always worked. Retweet.com, aside from having a much better domain has not offered me anything that TweetMeme does. What is the pitch to make me switch? They are running a competition that offers the chance to win some money. I tend to avoid such things due to the rule of large numbers. This will not be enough to make a credible move on the momentum of TweetMeme. This graph sums of how TweetMeme is doing:
So I give Retweet.com about a month to make drastic changes to their site, add in killer features that TweetMeme cannot match, and offer enough short term incentive to get websites to switch over from TweetMeme. After a month, there chances will have gone from slim to none.
-UPDATE-
The site is live, and has garnered a grand total of 1800 visitors so far. Here is the live link to the site right now. That site is not pretty.
-UPDATE-
Traffic seems to be quite slow to the site, given the amount of buzz that is surrounding it, it has 2600 visitors so far. Also, as a side note, they are only going to give away $10,000 in the competition if in fact they get 1,000,000 visitors in the first 3o days. So far, so bad.
