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For some, Twitter is a social network and for others it is just a broadcast medium. Judging from the latest data from social media analytics and monitoring service Sysomos, for the majority of users, Twitter is indeed mostly a broadcast medium. After analyzing over 1.2 billion tweets, the Sysomos team found that only 29% of tweets actually produce a reaction - that is, a reply or a retweet. According to Sysomos, just 6% of all tweets are retweeted and these retweets have a very short lifespan. Virtually all retweets happen within the first hour after the original tweet.

When a service makes its debut by getting accused of stealing code from one of its competitors, you know that it's going to be a tough road ahead. That was the case with the Twitter aggregator application Retweet.com, which went live earlier this week. Allegedly, the company snagged the code for both their JavaScript retweet button and WordPress plugin from their rival and current top aggregator, Tweetmeme.

Now with Retweet's official launch, you may be tempted to give them a second look... especially considering the $10,000 they're giving away. Don't bother. The service is still buggy, still using that stolen code (or so it seems), and that $10K? Well, you had better read the fine print.

At Social Media Camp 2009, Dan Zarrella of HubSpot gave a well-attended presentation about the etiquette and very real-world value of retweets. Although every power user's ego heart swells with pride with each of these 140-character validations he receives, the small- and medium-sized business owners using Twitter for marketing have a much more tangible interest at stake.

There are Twitter Terms of Service that help dictate how content is shared, and there are generally accepted community guidelines for attribution. Zarrella shared his researched insights on how to get more retweets and leverage Twitter to increase mindshare and drive traffic. He also talked about the value of Twitter as compared to other social networks in terms of conversion.

We have seen our fair share of new Twitter search engines and memetrackers over the last few months, so in order to stand out, a new service definitely has to offer something special. DailyRT bills itself as a straightforward tweet aggregator, but in addition to tracking retweets in real-time, dailyRT also offers a number of advanced search functions that none of its competitors currently offer.

Tweetmeme, a memetracker that tracks popular retweets on Twitter, just launched a real-time version of its service that displays tweets that are currently in heavy rotation on the popular microblogging service. In order to filter this constant stream of messages, Tweetmeme users can choose to only see messages that have been retweeted at least twice, though the default setting is for five retweets and can go up to twenty.