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"Retweeting is a big business.  Just ask Tweetmeme, the popular service that tracks the most shared stories on Twitter and provides the popular retweet buttons you see on many websites including Mashable.  They have experienced rapid growth, with impressions of their button reaching over ten million people.  They are the undisputed king of retweets.\nThe retweet market's about to get messy, though.  Tweetmeme's about to get a new challenger, and this one doesn't intend to play nice.  We were just informed that on Wednesday at about noon EST, competitor ReTweet.com will launch.  \nFrom the email we received and the parts of the un-launched website we were able to access, they are declaring all-out war on Tweetmeme by positioning their retweeting button \"the real retweet button\" and by enticing \"early adopters of tweetmeme.com to try retweet.com\" with a $10,000 contest.The new entrant to the Twitter retweet market will provide a button for retweeting blog posts just like the Tweetmeme button you see on Mashable articles (screenshot below). They also categorize and display the most-shared stories on Twitter, again like Tweetmeme. \nThe Retweet.com button page is already accessible, despite the Retweet.com homepage being locked.  The Win 10k Contest Page is also accessible (update: ReTweet.com just blocked both pages, screenshots below) .\nFirst, here's the first part of the email we received from Mesiab Labs, the company that owns ReTweet.com:\n\nWe'd like to take this opportunity to announce the public release of Retweet.com and give you a brief overview of what makes it special. When retweet.com goes live tomorrow [ 8/19/09 ] at around [ 12pm EST ] you will find we are running a competition to entice early adopters of tweetmeme.com to try retweet.com. The competition page, that will be found here ( http://retweet.com/win10k ) tomorrow will be announcing our $10,000 reward that will go to one lucky blogger who implements our retweet button, rewarded once we reach 1 million visitors. We believe that users should have the opportunity to be rewarded for helping a website succeed.\n...\nRetweet is the official place to find real-time news on popular stories, images, and videos. We provide this service by scanning thousands of updates on the worlds most popular micro-blogging service, Twitter.com and with the help of the future users whom have added our retweet button to their blog. The word retweet has now become one of the most popular terms online and thus makes the retweet.com brand name very powerful. We now live in a world where for the first time in history real-time news is possible thanks to modern web technologies and crowd sourced content creation, retweet is here to leverage this modern way of announcing and discovering news. We pride ourselves in providing \"news for the people, by the people\".. meaning we do not decide what news finds it's way to the home page of our site.\"\n\nIt's interesting that they publicly claim that they're directly targeting Tweetmeme users.  It's also interesting that the $10k prize requires a million visitors.  What standard will they use to measure that?\nNow here are screenshots of ReTweet.com's button page as well as their $10k contest page:\n\n\n\n\nThe contest page: \n\n\n\nThe language \"real retweet button\" consistently comes up.  Since they own the Retweet.com domain, they believe that can effectively position themselves as the real or official retweet button.  It's a bit disingenuous, but that's their wording.\nWhile ReTweet.com is a top-notch domain if you're going to challenge Tweetmeme, Tweetmeme has built up dominant market share and, just as important, credibility.  We firmly believe that it will take more than a $10,000 contest to get people to switch.  Still, being armed with a strong domain could make ReTweet.com a viable competitor.  It's also unknown how Project Retweet will affect both services.\nThere are a lot of unanswered questions this new competitor raises.  We're hoping to get some answers in about 12 hours.  In the meantime, what do you think?  Is ReTweet.com a viable competitor, or will Tweetmeme leave it in the dust?  Leave us your thoughts in the comments."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2009/08/19/retweet-launches-tomorrow/>