As anyone who uses the service regularly knows, Twitter has become much more than simply a way to tell the world what you’re having for lunch. It’s also a great way to pick up on breaking news and to discover and track emerging trends. However, Twitter itself doesn’t provide much in the way of support for these new uses. Sure, there’s the “Trending Topics” box on Twitter and search.twitter.com, but both of these have their limitations.

Tweetmeme is a great application that lets you see what the most popular topics of conversation are on Twitter right now. Unlike Search.Twitter.com, you don’t need to know what you’re looking for.  You can simply browse through the most commonly retweeted posts on Twitter, broken down into categories for your convenience.

See something you want to share? Tweetmeme lets you retweet it directly from their site! Want to encourage other people to share something you wrote? Tweetmeme offers buttons and widgets for your blog, too. Another cool feature is the ability to easily create a widget that lets you track the most popular tweets.

The user interface is clean, attractive and easy to use. This is not the first or the only place to track retweets, but the way it’s organized makes it easy to browse and discover stories you’re interested in. Also, the Live feed is hypnotic, updating every few seconds with stories that have been recently retweeted.  The  feed for everything on Twitter that has had 2 or more tweets is fast enough to make your head spin, but there’s a handy pause button you can press when something catches your eye.

So, how useful is Tweetmeme? If you want to discover what people are generally talking about on Twitter, it’s quite useful. If you’re on the prowl for news and information about the world outside of Twitter, it has some limitations. As Erick Schonfeld observed on TechCrunch:

The question is whether Twitter will be a better place to mine for buzz than blogs, news sites, or the rest of the Web.

Right now, I’d say the answer is no. Not because Tweetmeme doesn’t surface the most Tweeted stories, but because everyone on Twitter seems to be obsessed with linking to stories about Twitter!

That was written 3 days ago, and it’s just as true today, with 8 of the stories on the “Most Popular” page being about Twitter.

Our Rating of Tweetmeme

Tags: News

Categories:social