The big news on the Web this morning is Twitter’s announcement of the Tweet Button – an official version of popular buttons seen on countless blogs and websites. Twitter has been working on developing its own button for some time now and has employed the help of TweetMeme, makers of the widely used “retweet button,” to work out the kinks for its new system. Interestingly enough, however, TweetMeme seems to be making a significant gear shift today, as they have announced a new real-time Twitter analytics product, DataSift.
In its blog post this morning, Twitter mentioned it was happy to be collaborating with TweetMeme on the button project, but also noted that “from here on out, [TweetMeme] will be pointing to the Twitter Tweet Button.” Already, TweetMeme is recommending users switch to the official button on the homepage of the retweet button.
TweetMeme is refocusing its efforts away from simply monitoring retweets and clicks toward deeper, richer live analysis and filtering of the Twitter Firehose. TweetMeme CEO Nick Halstead mentioned in a blog post this morning that this new focus for the company will “manifest itself in the launch of a number of new products,” and today DataSift is the first of these products to be introduced.
DataSift claims it “gives developers the ability to leverage cloud computing to build very precise streams of data from the millions and millions of tweets sent everyday.” Users will be able to create, share, comment and rank these tuned data streams on the DataSift site – a process the company hopes will lead to massively powerful “super streams.”
As the introductory video above explains, users could curate a list of tweets from coffee shops in San Francisco, or photos posted near the Eiffel Tower. DataSift is currently taking applications for alpha testing, which Halstead says they hope to launch within the month.
“We hope that the product will allow developers to focus on the building of amazing new user experiences and let us worry about delivering the right content to the right person,” says Halstead.
While TweetMeme is continuing to offer its retweet button, DataSift is the first in a series of products in a new direction for the company. Highly anticipated official analytics and analysis tools from Twitter have yet to drop, and today’s Tweet Button announcement could be an early first step. It seems, however, that TweetMeme has their own plans with DataSift and other products, and perhaps that is what kept today’s announcement from being that of an acquisition.
