The idea behind Tweetmeme seems pretty simple: look at Techmeme and copy that but based around Twitter rather than tech blogs. It has some potential functionality-wise and with the rabid users of Twitter but I see a couple problems with it right off the bat. 1) they need some kind of language filter pronto. 2) It’s all entirely based around links on Twitter, which Twitter is still not very friendly with.

First off on the language front, I’m not trying to sound like an arogant American, but I simply cannot read about half the things on the main page of Tweetmeme and the subpages are even worse. We’ve got Japanese, Chinese, German, Spanish. It’s great these countries are so actively involved, but can we please get a language filter going? I’m sure not all of them want to read English either.

The 2nd part speaks to a larger problem I’ve had with Twitter for a while – it’s really bad at handling hyperlinks. In my experience sometimes it will encode them as tinyurls (I’m talking about the web-based app here), sometimes it won’t. Many times I have to encode them myself, which is a visit to another site that I simply shouldn’t have to make. Pownce runs circles around Twitter in this regard as they have a separate URL field with which to share links.

This matters for Tweetmeme because every conversation is formed based around a common link people have tweeted. One interesting aspect that Tweetmeme does have is the ability to apparently tell if a URL is a blog, an image, a video, or an audio file. This ability to sort could be very helpful in finding new hot links on Twitter based on what you are looking for.

Tweetmeme also fails to thank Techmeme in their initial blog post thank yous – which they probably should given that nearly every aspect of the Tweetmeme layout is identical to Techmeme’s layout. ‘Top Items’? Check. ‘New Item Finder’? Check. A “river”? Check. Upper right-hand corner timestamp? Check. Ads in the same place? Check. Subscribe area in the same place? Check. Archive in the same place? Check.

TechCrunch thinks Tweetmeme will turn into a game for people based around who can find the next hot link first so they’ll be the “leader” of the “coversation”. Certainly I could see that happening, but until Twitter itself gets serious about hyperlinks, you probably won’t be finding me too often on Tweetmeme.

[UPDATE]: Here are two more somewhat similar sites to check out that were left in the comments. The first is PownceMeme – which I’m sure you can imagine what it does. The second is Hashtags which tracks Twitter usage based on the usage of the hash sign followed by a word rather than links. [thanks Bryan and Rod]