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Posts Tagged ‘Button Code’

Retweet.com is No Competition for Tweetmeme

When a service makes its debut by getting accused for 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. Apparently, the company snagged the code for both their retweet button Javascript and the 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 that $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.

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The 10K Contest

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 a 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.

Discuss

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Defending Its Turf, TweetMeme Is Already Threatening To Sue ReTweet

It hasn’t even been 24 hours since we wrote about the impending launch of TweetMeme competitor ReTweet, and already TweetMeme founder Nick Halstead is threatening ReTweet with a lawsuit. He takes being king of retweets very seriously.

It is not so much the apparent flat-out copying of TweetMeme’s Website design (ReTweet has not even launched in private beta yet), that bothers him. After all, TweetMeme itself was highly “inspired” by another news aggregator, Techmeme. What bugs him is what he claims to be almost exact copying of code. Halstead writes on the TweetMeme blog:

What caught my attention was that some industrious individual (@travisketchum) had left a comment on the TechCrunch article that he had been doing some digging around on the website and had found a link to their development environment. What we found ourselves was that our retweet button Javascript and the Wordpress plugin code seemed to have been directly copied from ours.

He had to look no further than the code for the retweet button itself. The code below is what he found, which he says is “an exact copy of our own retweet button code with the word ‘tweetmeme’ replaced with ‘retweet’”.

(function()
{
var _url=window.location.href;
var _url=_url.replace(/((?:?|&)?fbc_receiver=.+)?(?:#.*)?$/,””);
var url=((typeof retweet_url==”string”)?retweet_url:((typeof retweet_URL==”string”)?retweet_URL:_url)).replace(/+/g,”%2b”);
var source=(typeof retweet_source==”string”)?escape(retweet_source):((typeof retweet_SOURCE==”string”)?escape(retweet_SOURCE):false);
var style=(typeof retweet_style==”string”)?escape(retweet_style):((typeof retweet_STYLE==”string”)?escape(retweet_STYLE):”normal”);
var src=”http://174.129.199.128/meme/widget/tweets/”;
switch(style){
case”compact”:
var h=20;var w=90;break;
case”rednose”:var h=71;var w=60;break;default:var h=71;var w=60;break
}
src+=url;
if(source!=false)
{
src+=”&source=”+source
}
document.write(”);
retweet_url=null;
retweet_URL=null;
retweet_source=null;
retweet_SOURCE=null;
retweet_style=null;
retweet_STYLE=null})();

I just hope all of these startups realize that Twitter could just end up trademarking the term just like they did with Tweet.

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