Backtype (YC08) releases Tweetcount, far more accurate than Tweetmeme

mashable.com

19 pointsrantfoil4 comments

The article makes it sounds so business like; so competitive, but what are these companies competing for? Who can add feature 'x' to twitter, when you know if feature 'x' shows profitability then twitter will copy it internally and the game is over... and if I was twitter I wouldn't buy that company out - I would just copy it.

You could have said the same thing about search, but then, Summize did get acquired by Twitter.

And, you're assuming that the only value in building out these features is the potential to get acquired. It's possible that the feature itself has some value to BackType given their business.

Saying Summize was acquired without us knowing how much was paid for it is misleading. It could have been "acquired" for less than the amount of a big signing bonus, in which case it's evidence against your point, not for it.

Generalized real time search is also almost certainly more valuable and difficult technically than counting re-tweets, thus more likely to be acquired at all.

I already implemented it on my blog, works almost perfectly. I'd like to change fonts, font sizes etc. as well though.

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