The Social

There's some chest-thumping going on over at TweetMeme, a service that rounds up "retweets" of popular links--much like Digg buttons--and aggregates them into a central site. A rival site, ReTweet, just announced its impending launch, and TweetMeme thinks the two are too similar.

More specifically, according to a blog post by TweetMeme's Nick Halstead, ReTweet's "retweet button Javascript and the Wordpress plugin code seemed to have been directly copied from ours." He said that TweetMeme is "seeking further legal advice."

Halstead says he was spurred by a commenter on a TechCrunch article who claims to have found the matching code.

ReTweet is not yet open to the public but claims that its product will be "off-da-hook."

Avid Twitter users are undoubtedly familiar with "retweeting," but here's a rundown: A retweet is a Twitter post (or tweet) that spreads around another user's tweet by posting "RT," the username of the account that originally posted the tweet, and then the content of the tweet (sometimes truncated so as to not push it above the 140-character limit).

TweetMeme has gained popularity because it makes Digg-like buttons that allow site visitors to send out retweets of articles or blog posts they may be reading, and industry blogs like TechCrunch and Mashable have begun installing TweetMeme buttons to count the number of retweets that a link has pulled in.

Halstead says the liaisons between the two Twitter app manufacturers go back a few months. "I had actually been contacted by their COO Tyson Quick in April to ask if we would support their plan to get Twitter to support retweeting natively on Twitter," he wrote on the TweetMeme blog. "At the time I responded that I would think about it, in fact what I thought was that they were obviously trying to get us to help them promote a service that would at a later stage turn into a competitor, so I ignored it."

ReTweet has said that the similarities in question came from the fact that the matching code was open-source.

Parent company Mesiab Labs responded in a blog post and says it has modified some code: "After some prompt discussions with our development team, we discovered that, indeed, one of our developers had based a prototype button and widget on tweetmeme.com's publicly viewable scripts and some of the same open source WordPress code," the post read. "As a company that prides itself on innovation and cutting edge development, we were a bit embarassed by the blunder, and promptly removed the scripts. Despite being well within our rights to use the publicly licensed code, we believe we can do better."

Since ReTweet has yet to even launch, this will have to be one to watch.

This post was updated at 12:52 p.m. PT.

Is Twitter getting possessive of its own name? Maybe.

A developer building an application using Twitter's API was told via e-mail that Twitter took issue with the user interface of his application, allegedly very similar to Twitter's own, as well as his use of the word "tweet" in the application's name.

The developer forwarded the e-mail to TechCrunch: "Twitter, Inc., is uncomfortable with the use of the word Tweet (our trademark) and the similarity in your UI and our own."

Uh-oh. If Twitter is staking a claim to the word "tweet," that could mean a problem for TweetDeck, TweetMeme, PoliTweets, and some of the other extremely popular businesses built atop Twitter.

A few things to keep in mind here. One, the developer was also creating a service that looked a lot like Twitter, the TechCrunch post explains, which means that the use of the word "tweet" may really have been less important than the e-mail made it out to be. Second, it's a personal e-mail coming from a Twitter employee--not a company representative or executive--which means that it may not be perfectly aligned with the company's official stance on things.

(Case in point: A Twitter investor hinted to The New York Times that the company would be making money with virtual coupons. One of Twitter's co-founders said in a comment on a blog that the investor was "brainstorming on his own.")

But the tech industry does have a history of getting into one skirmish after another over names similar to their trademarks. Several years ago, Apple started sending cease-and-desist letters to some third-party equipment companies and fan blogs that were using the word "pod" in their names. Google, too, has taken issue with the word "googling" being used as a generic verb.

And as TechCrunch points out, Twitter has filed for a trademark on the word "tweet." On the other hand, being possessive of this term (which, it goes without saying, has been a dictionary word for centuries) might not be the smartest strategy, if Twitter indeed wants to be a Digital Age communication standard "like electricity," as one executive said last month. So we'll see how this one unfolds.

UPDATE at 11:49 a.m. PT: Twitter co-founder Biz Stone has, as the company's executives often do when there's a rumor flurry about something Twitter's doing, put up a blog post to clarify. The answer, not surprisingly, is that these things are handled on a case-by-case basis.

And "tweet" is not a target, he said.

"We have no intention of 'going after' the wonderful applications and services that use the word in their name when associated with Twitter," Stone assured readers. "In fact, we encourage the use of the word Tweet."

It's more complicated when developers choose to use the word "Twitter," though it had been a dictionary word long before the microblogging company adopted the term.

"Regarding the use of the word Twitter in projects, we are a bit more wary although there are some exceptions here as well," Stone wrote. "After all, Twitter is the name of our service and our company so the potential for confusion is much higher. When folks ask us about naming their application with 'Twitter' we generally respond by suggesting more original branding for their project. This avoids potential confusion down the line."

This morning, it seems like everyone on my Twitter contacts list is talking about TweetClouds. It's an application that uses the microblogging service's API to create a "cloud" of the most frequently used words used in a given Twitter member's feed of "tweets."

It only works with Twitter accounts that are publicly accessible--some members keep their updates friends-only--and it takes a while for the app to munch through all the "tweets" and form a cloud. And like many small Twitter applications that get unexpected viral buzz, the server sometimes crashes. But when it's working, the end result can be kind of cool.

My TweetCloud.

(Credit: TweetClouds.com)

Judging by my Tweet Cloud, it looks like I most frequently Twitter about hopping around the grid of Manhattan. My most-Twittered word is "going," followed by words like "getting," "home," "time," and um, "party." After that, it looks like I Twitter about my job: words like "office," "work," "writing," "coffee," and "facebook" (the company I spend the most time writing about) are on there, too, as is "boston," a city I like to make fun of a lot.

Also in the cloud are some of my favorite things, like "running," "reading," and "pizza," and a display of my propensity for words like "dude," "awesome," "omg," and "pumped."

Another new application of note is TweetStats, a more quantitative Twitter application that crunches numbers on how often you Twitter, to whom you send the most "reply" tweets, and when you're Twittering the most (3 a.m. anyone?). CenterNetworks' Allen Stern suggests it as a way to spy on other Twitter users. He's probably got the right idea there.

Now if there were a way to mash up TweetClouds and TweetStats, well, that would be creepy.