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Tweetmeme DOA?

I’m fitting this in while visiting family, so this post is late, and likely short on insight - that being said, after pouring hours and days and weeks of hobby-time in building a relevancy algorithm (see: techwatching) I feel the need to comment on Tweetmeme, which launched yesterday to much fanfare.

Divining interesting-ness from a content pool depends on a number of bits of information that provide relationships between disparate bits, allowing them to be linked together into a topical unit (i.e.: a cluster of stories all discussing a certain topic) that makes sense. Over on TechWatching, I use four things to create topical units (”story clusters”):

1. forward links - the pages that a blog post links to
2. back links - the pages that link to a given page
3. keywords - the meaningful words that posts share - i.e.: proper names like “Google” are counted, conjunctions like “and” are not
4. time - content must have some chronological proximity to be considered “linked” - i.e.: an article about Google from two months ago is less likely to be discussing the topic-du-jour than an article from two hours ago

Now, Techwatching indexes blog posts - which are characterized by all of the above four points - i.e.: blogs are noted for linking, posting quickly (chronological proximity), using relevant keywords and so on. My question about Tweetmeme is whether Twitter provides the same fertile breeding ground of memetic confluence as blogs… Personally, I think its ephermal nature and limited length works against it. Aside from the occaisonal exceptions (Apple events, the socal fires), Twitter seems to be pretty scattershot - and those special situations seem to me to be better served by something more explicit, like hashtags.

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