Twitter buys ‘re-tweet.com’, may build Tweetmeme competitor [Updated]

We’ve been tipped by website Fusible that Twitter has purchased the domain re-tweet.com. This seems to indicate that it may be planning on building a competing service to the website Tweetmeme, which supplies a button that allows websites to offer instant retweets of a blog post or article. Updated with response from Twitter below.

Apparently the domain was purchased from David Quinlan on June 12, 2011 by Twitter. The domain had previously sold at public auction for $15 on March 28th of this year according to domain sales site Flippa.

Domain Name………. re-tweet.com
Creation Date…….. 2009-02-07
Registration Date…. 2011-06-11
Expiry Date………. 2013-02-07
Organisation Name…. Twitter, Inc.
Organisation Address. 795 Folsom Street
Organisation Address. Suite 600
Organisation Address. San Francisco
Organisation Address. 94107
Organisation Address. CA
Organisation Address. UNITED STATES
UPDATED DATE: 2011-06-13

A similar domain, ‘retweet.com’, was sold in 2010 for $250,000, that site is now a video platform. We have reached out to Twitter for comment and will update you if we receive confirmation of the purchase.

In addition to supplying a retweet button, Tweetmeme uses the statistics gathered by that button to present a catalogue of the most-shared Tweets on the web. If Twitter were to launch its own competing service it would be most likely able to integrate these kinds of statistics into its current ‘top tweets’ ranking.

Update: Twitter has responded to this story to let us know that they have no current plans for the future of ‘re-tweet.com’. The owner of the domain offered to give it to Twitter and they now manage it as part of their ‘brand protection strategy’. So, nothing to see here folks, move along.