What if you could get rewards towards future purchases, just by sharing what you have in your closet already? Zappos founder Nick Swinmurn has launched a new site to do just that. It’s called RNKD, and it wants you to show the world what kind of clothing and accessories you already own.

Even though the site launched last month and is still in beta, RNKD shared some extremely interesting stats with us that show a growing community for the premise. You might think that something like RNKD is just for the ladies, but the company tells us that 46% of users are male. They’re seeing some eye-popping engagement too, with users sharing 26 items each on average.

The idea is pretty brilliant when you think about it, if people share the items that they already have, then the site will known exactly what brands to partner with and what deals to offer to its user base. RNKD says that 2,000 different brands have been uploaded to the site so far.

The most popular brands on the site are Nike, Ralph Lauren, Express, and H&M. With this type of data, RNKD can do some serious damage in the social shopping space.

Show me yours, I’ll show you mine

Just getting deals based on what you have already purchased is interesting enough, but being able to share the contents of your closets with others takes it to another level. Each user gets a profile, and that profile shows all of the items that they have uploaded.

You can search through the items by type, brand, or the store that they bought it from. One neat feature is a quick breakdown of items by category so if you were holiday shopping, you’d be able to see the gaps in your friends wardrobe.

You can upload your items on the site, or use RNKD’s iOS and Android apps.

Reward me!

Here’s where things get interesting on RNKD. The more you share, the more chances you have to win rewards. The rewards or none other than Zappos gift certificates. Makes sense, since RNKD’d creator is the founder. The site sets up fun little categories like “Most Improved” and “Best Watch Collection” and rewards its users with gift certificates to buy more stuff. Pretty genius. You can even get badges for the types of things you share, cementing your place as a top brand maven.

If you’re really into fashion, you can get lost for hours on this site. RNKD has done a really awesome job of making everything clickable and shareable, so you can share something from someone else’s closet on Facebook or Twitter.

We’re told that of the items uploaded, the average user shares 12 different brands & 9 different stores, so I have to imagine that partnerships with these big brands are coming soon. It’s the perfect audience to share deals and exclusives with, and since they’re showing what they have in their closet already, we know that they like to buy.

➤ RNKD

In July of last year, we speculated that the Techmeme team was considering expanding from solely aggregating news articles to also including Twitter’s 140 character messages.

In a recent post, McCarthy writes, that tweets will appear as headlines when people break news on Twitter and tweets that are commentary on stories will show up as part of the discussion section for that story, along with links to related blog posts and coverage from other news outlets. For an example, see this cluster.

I contacted McCarthy regarding the announcement shortly after.

CBM: What led you to this decision?

MM: It seemed like an obvious progression. We include short blog posts and news stories in the way we display news, so it makes sense to include shorter news items sent out on Twitter. You can say a lot in less than 140 characters, and this gives us a way to include those thoughts.

CBM: What do you see coming from it?

MM: I foresee more voices being discovered. I think our readers will like having one place to see reaction about different stories from across different publishing mediums – mainstream news outlets, blog posts, Twitter accounts. I hope people will find Mediagazer to be an invaluable resource that clearly shows the bigger picture about the top media news of the day.

This decision gives Twitter a huge boost of power status. It has now become a full fledged broadcast platform. Techmeme and Mediagazer’s decision to include Tweets as headlines means they’re giving each Twitter user the opportunity to become their very own publisher.

Is today the day that 140 character tweets can officially become news sources? Will bloggers tweet breaking news and then spend more time analyzing it in more thoughtful posts? Will Twitter conversations be contenders for headlines?

The news just got a whole lot faster.