Webware

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.

(Credit: Compete.com)

Unless you have been inhabiting the underground bunker formerly occupied by Dick Cheney, you've probably seen loads of press coverage over a "25 Things About Me" Internet meme that was spreading on Facebook. Basically, members would create a Facebook "note" containing 25 facts about themselves, and then "tag" 25 friends encouraging them to do the same.

Yes, it was a bona fide phenomenon, but I avoided writing about it, because I thought the whole thing was...dumb. Internet memes of that nature have been around since goodness knows when. Breathless press hype over it seemed a tad silly.

But here's something legitimately interesting. Analytics firm Compete.com says that there may actually have been a boost to Facebook traffic as a result of "25 Things," at least in the U.S.: 60 percent more Facebook profiles were created in January than in December. That's not surprising, because Facebook still requires a user account to access all its content--curious newcomers who read about "25 Things" would need to register for accounts in order to explore it.

More noticeably, U.S.-based traffic to Facebook's "notes," normally one of the social network's quieter features, skyrocketed. Four times more visitors than usual hit up the notes feature in January, according to Compete, with 28 percent of Facebook's U.S. users checking them out. (The wildly popular photo-album feature usually draws 60 percent of visitors, for comparison.)

The caveat is that Facebook continues to grow fast and so some of this could be attributed to natural growth rather than "25 Things" momentum. That said, Facebook's U.S. growth has long since started to stabilize--three-quarters of its new users now come from overseas.

Compete has said that its analysts will be posting a blog entry about this later in the week, ideally with some more insight into just how much those annoying "25 Things" lists really did catch on. I've also pinged Facebook to see if they have any internal numbers on the topic.

Here's what'll be interesting to see, at least from my perspective: Will this mean that the newfound popularity of "notes" will last? I post photos, links, and other share-able items to my Facebook profile all the time, but I think I've written a Facebook note a total of once (to alert my friends list that I'd lost all their phone numbers in a personal-electronics mishap). Note-writing always struck me as something that was a little bit too promiscuous for the mainstream Facebook user, the sort of thing that navel-gazing, overshare-prone Twitterers would spring for but which didn't fit in quite as well with the directory-like nature of the social network.

Guess I was wrong. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, after all, likes to say that Facebook has incrementally made the Web's masses more comfortable with sharing more and more information. The success of "25 Things," consequently, must be one of his great triumphs. And now he knows all these useless facts about so many millions of people.

Heaven forbid: Facebook notes could be like a gateway drug to blogging for everyone.

This post was expanded at 9:51 a.m. PT.

In one of the most useful and engaging Web 2.0 productivity apps we've seen in ages, Bacolicious promises to make your browsing experience so very delicious by superimposing an image of a piece of tasty, tasty bacon over everything you navigate.

Here's how you use it: Type in the Bacolicious URL followed by the URL you would like to load. So, for example, http://bacolicio.us/http://icanhazcheezburger.com if you think that your grammatically challenged cat would like to have a bacon "cheezburger."

It's all part of the bizarre Internet meme centered on borderline cult worship of bacon, as seen in the rise of blogs like Bacon Bacon Bacon. See also: Pancakes. Now I'm really hungry.

Happy Friday.

Microsoft's Live Labs team has just released a new way to track political discourse on the Web. Called Political Streams, the tool tracks news stories on both blogs and traditional-news sites, and ranks it based on velocity and overall coverage.

What's really neat is that it also keeps track of mentioned names and places in each story, to show how much coverage that person or part of the world has received within the last 30 days.

Each item can be drilled down into a little further, which is where you can see a small one-paragraph summary and the two charts for the coverage of people and places. Each of these places and names also gets its own page that lists related news, which makes it a very topical experience. The information itself comes from Freebase, the Wikipedia-like open-database project.

Political Streams tracks popular political headlines and tracks their mentions in both traditional media and blog sources.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Much like Google's recent Blog Search page efforts, Live Labs' Political Streams also keeps track of a very important number--how long a story has continued to get play. This number stems from the first time it began getting tracked through the service's crawling engine, which doesn't necessarily dictate where it sits on the list of top stories.

One interesting thing I noticed is that the top stories on the blog side were less than half the age of those on the traditional-news side. That, of course, is bound to change, depending on the day's news.

Political Streams is the first site of its kind from the Live Labs team. I expect that we'll see additional "streams" pages for tech, world, sports, and celebrity news after the presidential election.

See also: Memeorandum and Blogrunner.

In many ways, Wednesday's release of an updated front page to Google Blog Search has put blog news tracking into the limelight. Google didn't get there first though. Sites like Techmeme, Blogrunner, and Technorati have been tracking the hottest blog posts for quite some time. Now's a good point to take a look at what makes these sites (and others) individual and different from Google's new tool.

Editor's note: this list is in no particular order.

Google Blog Search's new homepage is simple, but not that smart about melting down information into a small amount of space.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

1. Google Blog Search

In case you missed Wednesday's news, Google's new blog search tool organizes the biggest news and the sites that are breaking it. The service is entirely automated, and meant to be a quick way to figure out what's going on outside of mainstream media outlets--the sources that make their way onto Google's sister site, Google News.

Google Blog Search's core feature is that it shows you not only how many different blogs have written about a particular topic, but also within what period of time. It also blends in some of Google's trends prowess to show you how a story's prominence has increased or decreased by the hour.

2. Techmeme

To compare, let's start with Techmeme. Techmeme is a site run by Gabe Rivera, who has formulated a software-powered algorithm that automatically figures out which stories are hot and orders them accordingly. Items change throughout the day, with as much importance placed on who wrote the story and where it came from as the topic itself.

One of the things that makes Techmeme stand out from the rest is its speed. The service is constantly crawling thousands of news sources, and it promotes and demotes items depending on the day's story velocity. It's also updating its list of sources on a daily basis, so new sites that offer good coverage can rise in the ranks at a good clip.

Techmeme's story filter does its best to figure out whose story is getting the most play and linkage from around the Web.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Compared with Techmeme, the sources in Google Blog Search are weighted a bit differently. Google's taken it's "all of the Web!" approach here, which means you're going to see a lot of junk blogs that are likely taking content from elsewhere. As automated as Techmeme is, there's still some behind-the-scenes selection going on (via the software) that keeps those copycat blogs out of the mix. The same cannot be said for Google's current offerings, although that is likely to change.

One of the criticisms of Techmeme has been its recognition of who "broke" a story. The service's policy is to give an author a primary headline (instead of a relational link based on how many other blogs are linking to that post), combined with when it surfaced. The system is not perfect though--in cases where several publications release a post that's been embargoed things get fuzzy.

Also worth noting is that Techmeme is just one of four companion sites that use this same system for different topics. There's also celebrity gossip tracker WeSmirch; Memeorandum, which focuses on political news; and baseball news tracker Ballbug.

This story continues after the break. Keep reading for numbers 3-7, and which one you should use to track news.

(Credit: Dipity)

Timeline creator Dipity has finally been put to a completely awesome use: a user called "tatercakes" has created a timeline of fads and memes that have surfaced on the Internet since its earliest days. And, as far as I can see, almost nothing has been left out--if you're a Dipity member, you can add to the list.

Among the chronological listings are some memes that pre-date my knowledge of the Internet ("Trojan Room coffee pot"); a few classics like All Your Base, Hampsterdance, and Peanut Butter Jelly Time; and more recent ones like lolcats and Rickrolling. Don't know what those are? Check out the timeline.

There are also a few culturally significant moments that go beyond the Web, like Stephen Colbert's White House Press Correspondents Dinner speech in 2006. The pirated C-SPAN clip of that speech taught the media industry that it's tough to put a lockdown on video that everybody wants to see, taught the White House that you should really be familiar with a comedian's schtick before booking him for a speaking engagement, and taught millions of erstwhile American Luddites about the possibilities of YouTube.

Aside from that, the list does not yet include many of the people who have arguably turned into Internet memes themselves: digitally beloved politicians like Howard Dean in 2004 and Ron Paul earlier this year, a smattering of YouTube stars, and over-the-top bloggers like Perez Hilton.

But Sen. Ted Stevens' parodied, mocked, and dance-remixed "Series of Tubes" speech was the only really glaring omission I saw, aside from a few memes that are entirely too disgusting to mention in a family-friendly context (though be warned, a few gross-outs like "Goatse" are already on the list).

It also fails to mention, at least at this point, the latest Internet meme: the Internet meme timeline.

Blogged.com, a site that started off as a ratings-powered blog directory has branched out into new territory this morning. It's now compiling the hottest news headlines by hand. Competing news tracking services like TechMeme, Google News, and BlogRunner use automated systems or a slight mix of automation and editorial choice to categorize news as it happens. Blogged's will be entirely human-driven.

The move is a bit of a gamble to get people in the door. Once a user is looking at a story, they can dig into Blogged's directory and check out its rating, hopefully coming back later to add their own. There's also a new search tool that will let you search both blog listings and individual posts based on topic.

I got to ask founders Kenneth Yeh and Gladys Kong about the people behind these story selections. Apparently the team of feeders is the same group who's behind the blog ratings. Believe it or not, that means they're getting paid to sit around and read blog content in over a dozen different categories. "Our editors have pretty good taste," Yeh said. Not to mention a job (Yeh says they're hiring).

That same taste is what determines which stories get front page placement, even if someone else breaks the news first. The company is hoping quality will rule over velocity, although Yeh expects them to have approximate speed to the competitors.

Still on the horizon are additional ratings for writers, and a way to comb news using those ratings. "We are still working on that piece, as much as ratings," said Yeh.

Blogged's new story page will track hot stories in different disciplines.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

This post was updated at 11:18 AM PT to correct the date of the announcement.

Yahoo announced Thursday that it has made some minor upgrades to Buzz, the social news service that it launched in February.

Most notably, the company has released a "Top Buzz" widget that site and blog owners can embed in their Web sites, displaying the top articles in Yahoo Buzz or those from a specific Buzz category. There are also now RSS feeds for stories submitted to Buzz as well as each of its categories, and "First Buzzed By" indicators much like the "Submitted By" taglines on competitor Digg.

Yahoo Buzz remains in a beta test phase, but the company says it's growing fast despite major congestion in the social news and meme-tracking market. New publishers continue to roll into the program, and Yahoo has a perk that even Digg can't offer: placement on the Yahoo front page for heavily "buzzed" stories. That'll get you a lot of eyes.

If you're familiar with Techmeme, Tailrank, and other services that track content trends on the Web, you should bookmark a new service called Twitlinks. It uses a hand-picked selection of technology personalities on Twitter and compiles their tweets into a news feed. If there are news links or stories that come out of those tweets, they'll end up on the front page, in a reverse chronological view mere minutes after they're posted.

The list of tweet sources is made public, and currently comes in at just fewer than 100 bloggers, entrepreneurs, and personalities including my boss Rafe, as well as the Webware and CNET News.com RSS Twitterbots. There will be more added in the future, as decided by creator Gary Brewer, whose other works include WebsiteValued and Global Surfari--a mash-up that helps you find good surf spots.

Beside the core site there's also a mobile version of Twitlinks and a Google gadget. Power users can also add the RSS feed to be kept up-to-date with the latest items--although as a word to the wise, new items come in every five minutes, so you'd be wise to set up a filter or special folder in your RSS reader.

I expect to see other similar spinoff sites make their way if Twitlinks evolves into a network. The same technique could be used to emulate the experience for entertainment and celebrity gossip, as well as world and local news depending on the community of focused Twitterers out there. Essentially the site is just rebranding the experience of creating a Twitter account and befriending a group of people, but part of the reason for visiting is the curatorship--something you don't always get from other Twitter popularity services such as Twitterholic or Tweetmeme, which is far less focused.

Related: Crowdstatus lets you micromanage your Twitter buddies

[via ReadWriteWeb]

New Tweets show up in reverse chronological order and come mostly from popular tech blogs. Twitlinks also blends in tech personalities, to include other links and bits and pieces of Web content.

(Credit: CNET Networks)