The developers of Fav.or.it, the so-called RSS 2.0 service that publicly republished content from other sites, have abandoned the service in favor Tweetmeme.

Whether Fav.or.it was abandoned due to it being a failure isn’t clear from CEO Nick Halstead’s post, although as Louis Gray points out in his coverage, the main driver behind abandoning development of Fav.or.it was the success of the company’s newer product Tweetmeme.

We’ve not written much about Tweetmeme previously; Steven Hodson mentioned Tweetmeme when writing earlier today about the risks involved with basing a business on the Twitter API, and I do agree with his analysis. There is though another aspect about Tweetmeme that needs to be explored: that’s the Techmeme 2.0 aspect.

There is a lot to like about Tweetmeme: the sites provision of retweet buttons for example has been a huge success, although how you monetize that is another matter. The overall idea of creating a meme tracker based on Twitter links is fairly sound, and of all the similar services in this space, there’s little doubt that it is currently the market leader.

The problem I have with Tweetmeme is the results. It’s not entirely the developers fault, but the results show an over-riding bias to sites that have Twitter accounts that are offered as “recommended subscriptions” by Twitter itself when new users sign up. It’s Techmeme 2.0, although with Mashable riding alongside TechCrunch in this instance (Mashable barely gets a look in on Techmeme.) Tweetmeme doesn’t primarily reflect the best content shared on Twitter, but the content shared by those with the most followers because those accounts will always have more shares.

Of the 15 top items on the front page of Tweetmeme as a write this, two items are ads, six items are from Mashable, and three items are from TechCrunch. Four items are from accounts that don’t get favored status from Twitter, and would appear by all accounts to have legitimately earned their place on the front page through organic sharing.

If the purpose of a meme tracker is discovery of new and interesting content, Tweetmeme fails: I can easily subscribe to and read Mashabe or TechCrunch, and in the case of Mashable I do.

What Tweetmeme needs to do is develop an algorithm that levels the playing field to some degree. A Twitter account with 10,000 followers who has 100 retweets should be ranked more highly in the results than a Twitter account with 1 million followers who has 100 retweets. It isn’t as simple as this in implementation (you couldn’t ratio down to 100 followers for example due to spam issues), but it’s not impossible either.

It is fairly early days for Tweetmeme, and as much as company head Nick Halstead would be no fan of mine, he would appear to be highly talented and able to make the change. All that is needed is the will to make Tweetmeme a better product.

Related posts:

1. Topsy: a Twitter search engine that’s a good idea in theory only
2. TweetBlocker kills Twitter spammers fast
3. Mashable innovates with new Twitter ad format

I wasn’t happy with Shyftr for trying to do something similar, but Fav.or.it makes Shyftr look like school boys on a country outing because under Fav.or.it’s model, content is republished in full in areas fully available to the casual browser.

If that’s not rich enough their we won’t publish your content rule is beyond belief. This page demands that people who don’t want their content published in full on Fav.or.it must apply a creative commons license and only then will Fav.or.it decide to only publish an excerpt instead.

Their defense of the service: comments are pushed back to the source. That and it offers a similar service to commenting systems like Sezwho with comment tracking etc…

The only word that I can think of: leaches.

This is going to be defined as a blogging 2.0 service and in use it offers an interesting and somewhat appealing package to the end user. But in doing so it steals page views away from the original content creators, creating a win/ lose situation where there should and could be a win/ win one.

To be fair they don’t republish all content in full, but the fact they are doing it on any content unless their stupid criteria is met would be a DMCA notice waiting to happen if the company was American (they aren’t unfortunately). Republishing in full of anyone’s content should ALWAYS be on an opt-in basis, not an opt-out basis for a legitimate service, and copyright laws in most countries would mandate that this is the case, particularly when the content is republished for commercial use (in Australia, some personal use copying is legal).

And exactly when did splogging become a business model again? It’s like a whole chunk of the world missed the memo that ripping peoples content off for your own commercial gain is immoral and wrong, no matter how well you flavor the end product. Or am I simply a dying breed of online creators who believes in a fair go for all and that content creators still have some rights over the republication of their content in full?

The bonus takeaway: try clicking on the names of the blogs on each post in Fav.or.it: they’re even trying to scam Google juice on the blog names through an internal linking scheme. Links to the original post are via little tiny boxes, one next to the title (to the post), one next to the blog name to the blog itself.

Update: Fav.or.it reminds me of Topix. Topix republishes excerpts from blogs and other news sources and builds a community around that, but notably they license the rights for any content they publish in full. In only publishing the excerpt they comply with copyright, and they also drive traffic back to the source. Everyone wins.

Related posts:

1. Favorit abandons splogging in favor of running Tweetmeme
2. Exclusive: b5media selling off business blogs
3. Blogs.mu offer a DIY blog network