Sysomos also looked at how these @reply threads play out on Twitter. A typical Twitter conversation is very short-lived. About 85% of those tweets that actually generate a reply only have one reply. Only 11% of these conversations have a second reply and very few Twitter conversation go deeper than that.

As this video shows, though, this doesn't negate the fact that some messages obviously go viral and see far more retweets and @replies than the average tweet. In general, though, Sysomos' data shows that tweets do tend to be rather short-lived.

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.

A contest to promote the new service isn't really a bad idea on Retweet.com's part. But with this contest, there's no guaranteed winner. If, and only if, the site reaches their goal of 1 million visitors will that "lucky blogger" receive any money. And then there's the fact that their promotional video doesn't even say "visitors"; it says "page views" (or "page votes"... it's kind of hard to tell). Obviously, 1 million page views is quite a different thing than visitors. In fact, it's quite a different thing than unique visitors, which is what they're actually counting by the looks of it.

Bugs

Still, if you're thinking of taking your chances, be warned that your button might not end up displaying the correct number of tweets, which is the entire point of the service. As one Twitter user discovered, the button seems to have gone completely haywire in this case:

Over 3 million tweets? We don't think so. Normally, we'd give a new service a pass when they first launch, expecting there to be bugs here and there, but considering that Retweet.com stole the button code from Tweetmeme, you would think they could get it right.

Stolen Code

Oh, and that stolen code? Apparently even by launch day, they were still using it... or at least it appears that way. As Milo Yiannopoulos and others discovered when receiving errors on their link submissions, the table name referenced in the database error still reads "tweetmeme_web.firstlinks_new." That's right, the table name. For those of you who aren't all that familiar with databases, this is much more troubling. Notes one commenter, this means that the Retweet.com folks somehow managed to get their hands not just on Tweetmeme's front-end code, but also their database schema and backend code, too. Either that, or they decided to write their own code using the names of their competitor for the table names. Which are you inclined to believe?

Tyson Quick of Mesiab Labs, the company behind Retweet.com, responded to the blog post angrily saying "I can assure you that Mesiab Labs isn't using any of tweetmeme's code." However, he made no mention of the screenshot or how the word "tweetmeme" got in there. We would still like to know.

Even with all of this drama, an imitator such as this still stands a chance, unfortunately. That's why it's encouraging to see Tweetmeme taking the high road and staying busy creating new features for us like the upcoming "retweetable comments," for example. The comments are part of a major overhaul which will also bring improvements to the news filtering, spam detection, and search features as well as other small changes. Hopefully, Retweet.com won't try to rip off these features too.

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.

Zarella said people love to retweet new blog posts from users they follow. They also love retweeting content containing links and don't mind being asked for a retweet. Finally, retweets have a snowball effect; a retweeted tweet is more likely to be retweeted again by other users.

If I never type "retweet" again, it will be too soon.

Check out Zarrella's presentation below:

DailyRT also allows you to save your searches, which is especially useful if you regularly search for the same terms.

One problem we noticed, though, was that dailyRT does not support the Boolean searches (AND, OR, etc.) that Twitter's own search engine offers. This takes at least some of the usefulness out of the service's advanced search features. (Update: DailyRT's Chris Williams tells us that Boolean searches are coming tonight).

We'd love to see a service that, in addition to dailyRT's advanced search features, would also add some of the personalization that a custom memetracker like MicroPlaza offers. But, for now, we'll have to do with dailyRT's advance search which is already a great step forward.

Channels

In addition to these real-time streams, Tweetmeme is also focusing on providing channels about specific topics including this one for Earth Day, for example. Thanks to this, it might soon be a lot easier to filter out the noise during a big conference, for example, where it is usually impossible to keep distinguishing between high-value tweets and random invitations for lunch.

Sadly, these channels don't yet feature the new live streams, which is really a shame. It would also be great if we could create custom channels based on keyword searches that are then filtered by Tweetmeme, and presented in a real-time stream. We can't imagine, however, that the Tweetmeme team isn't working on something like this already (and maybe even implementing real-time updates in the mobile version as well).

Tweetmeme's backend is sponsored by Sun through the company's Startup Essentials program. The company also has an interesting business model, and it features some interesting leaderboards and stats about every item.

Twitter and Real-Time: A Marriage Made in Heaven

Twitter and  real-time clearly go hand-in-hand. Just in the last few weeks, we saw the launch of two new real-time Twitter search engines, Twazzup (our review) and Tweetmi, and, of course, there is also Monitter, the grandfather of Twitter real-time services. Tweetmeme's new real-time stream looks like a great compliment to those, and from what we've heard, the team still has a lot of great ideas about how to make the service even better.

Thanks to Marjolein Hoekstra (@cleverclogs) for alerting us to this new feature.