Twitter Button to Replace Tweetmeme?

Twitter has launched it’s own “tweet this” button for blogs and websites; an intended replacement for the many third party buttons people are currently using for web content sharing. The biggest of those companies is Tweetmeme, whose service we use here at Slaw. Here’s a capture from Twitter’s new offering:

Techcrunch calls it “poaching the best ideas from the eco-sytem”, and it’s a strategy Twitter’s used for innovation a few times now. The best example is probably shown by the company watching the iPhone app market evolve for Twitter clients. Once the innovation had taken place and proved itself, Twitter followed in by launching their own entry. Low risk & high reward.

This time, rather than going head-to-head with one of those third party companies (see: Tweetdeck), Twitter has done a business agreement & technology licensing with Tweetmeme. Could be that they’re playing nice here, considering the company says it created the plugin “from scratch”. The agreement certainly created buy-in from Tweetmeme’s founder Nick Halstead, who’s quoted in the Techcrunch piece as saying: “We expect people to switch, and we support that.”