Twitter Mobile Web Adds Reply, Retweet, Favorite..

Twitter Mobile Web was friendly only for status update. There was no reply button, no retweet button and no favorite button.

It was kind of frustrating to remember the Twitter ID of the person, and then type it in the update box(without spelling mistakes!) and send the reply.

Recently Twitter has added bunch of new features to it, to make it more useful. Now I don’t use any Apps, I just use the simple mobile web interface.

Some of the things added to Twitter Mobile Web are – reply, retweet, favorite, turn off the images, Popular topics, popular topics of today week etc, real time search capabilities, hhmm, but the copy rights has not yet been updated, its still showing © 2009. If you find some thing more, please share it with us in the comment section.

Missing..
Yes, I still miss the display of updates in AJAX style(That we can see on Standard Twitter Web). We need to refresh each time to see the new updates. And there is a big Refresh button provided at the top for this purpose.

Here are some of the screen shots from my Nokia 6630.

Twitter-mobile-web-login-linkTwitter-mobile-web-popular-topics

Twitter-mobile-web-popular-topics-weeklyTwitter-mobile-web-login-screen

Twitter-Mobile-Web-HomepageTwitter-mobile-web-tweet-reply-retweet-favorite

Twitter-mobile-web-billgates-tweetTwitter-Mobile-Web-fail-whale

Problem!
Although there was one issue(at the time of writing this post). Once you goto twitter mobile web and input your user id and password and hit signin, it just refuses to signin and stays on the same page. There is a big Refresh button at the top of the page, which is of no use!

To get into Twitter, all you need is, to switch to Standard Twitter Webpage – signin and then switch back to Twitter Mobile Web, and it works!

Interview with ReTweet.com

Differences, controversies (ReTweet.com v/s TweetMeme.com) apart, today we have Mesiab Labs Chief Operations Officer Tyson Quick. We thank Tyson for taking time for this interview.

For those who don’t know about ReTweet.com: As you might have already guessed by its name, it is a new service that shows popular links being shared(tweeted) and re-shared (retweeted) mainly across Twitter.

They surly have got a killer domain name ReTweet.com and a super URL shortner rt.nu.

ReTweet.com

Here is the interview:

1. Please tell our readers about yourself and ReTweet.com service.

Retweet is the official place to find real-time news on popular stories, images, and videos. We provide this service by scanning thousands of updates on the worlds most popular micro-blogging service, Twitter.com and with the help of users like you whom have added our retweet button to your blog. The word retweet has now become one of the most popular terms online and describes the action of repeating or sharing someones original tweet / story. We now live in a world where for the first time in history real-time news is possible thanks to modern web technologies and crowd sourced content creation, retweet is here to leverage this modern way of announcing and discovering news. We pride ourselves in providing “news for the people, by the people”.. meaning we do not decide what news finds it’s way to the home page of our site.

Retweet is still a baby ( thus the BETA ), expect to see many improvements over the next few months as we have great things in store. In the mean time, help us improve the service by adding our button to your blog.

2. Some history behind the service ReTweet.com

Retweet.com is a side-project, as our software products are priority. We purchased the Retweet.com domain name 4 months ago for a substantial amount of money knowing exactly what we were going to do with it. At this time tweetmeme ( our main competitor in this arena only had around 200k monthly visitors ).

3. What inspired for the creation of a service around Twitter.

I ( Tyson Quick – COO ) thought up the idea around the same time the plane crash happened in the Hudson river and it was first reported via TwitPic… real-time “crowd-sourced” news was being born. I was also a fan of DIGG.com at the time and saw how twitter could essentially be used the same exact way. Believe it or not, our team had this idea before we ever saw tweetmeme.. although they were obviously the first ones to jump on the bandwagon.

4. What are the long term business plan and business model for ReTweet.com?

I cannot expose our business plans for retweet.com at this time, although we do have a well planned business model ( note: this does not rely on us ever passing tweetmeme in traffic ) – Although this is one of our long-term goals.

5. What new features can we expect from ReTweet.com in coming days?

We will first be matching our competitors features 100% and then adding additional features we thought up ourselves. I also cannot release these details at this time. But, i’ll assure you our users will like them.

6. How big or small is ReTweet.com, as a company?

Retweet.com is run by Mesiab Labs: Mesiab Labs is an LLC established and registered in Boise, Idaho. The company was initially funded by the now dissolved software company Easy Ad, owned and operated by Kevin Mesiab. The executive team consists of Kevin Mesiab ( CEO ), Tyson Quick ( COO ), and Sean Boone ( Director of Design ). Mesiab Labs builds market leading software and web based applications in various markets. We have a total of 4 people on Staff. All our projects are self-funded, we have never accepted VC or outside funding.

7. How important do you think the numbers game in Twitter (I am talking about the follower count)? Do you think it matters?

If you are a Business, then numbers are extremely important. When it comes to marketing, businesses rely on how many potential customers they can reach.

8. What do you have to say about Twitter banning @retweet account.

We believe Twitter Banned our @retweet account because they are trying to trademark the term ( we have a pending trademark as well ) and because of their up-coming launch of their internal retweet function. From Twitter’s standpoint they might be worried about a 3rd party owning an account on their platform that is associated with the 2nd largest twitter term ( 2nd only to tweet )

9. What are your thoughts about Twitter getting the copyrights on Tweet and ReTweet?

Well the term tweet has already been denied and we believe the same will occur with the term retweet. We are confident that we will be granted it if anybody gets the trademark because of the related domain name and the fact that the domain has been registered for over two years before we purchased the rights to it.

10. How do you think, you stand out from your competitors?

Right now we have not added many features that differ from our competitors, we first have to play the catch-up game. We have many features planned that have yet to be implemented. Right now the main thing that stands out about our company is our brand power and our extensive experience in online marketing. We also own our own url shortner rt.nu that is being implemented with retweet, as well as checkretweet.com

11. If you want to tell something else to our readers, you can tell

Retweet.com will remain an extremely social site, holding monthly competitions, etc.

Its left to you which service you use on your blog, but its always good for bloggers to know the alternatives and its pros and cons. Take the interview positively, and we love to see a positive competition between ReTweet.com and TweetMeme.com, Wishing them best of luck. Hope you enjoyed the interview.

Related: An Interesting Interview with TweetMeme