Twitter will reportedly soon get its own external sharing tool that will help both users and publishers share content on the popular social publishing platform.
Based on internal company documents, blog Mashable on Wednesday unearthed details on the "Tweet Button" program, which centers on an embeddable sharing button. When put on third-party sites, it will allow users to share whatever content they're looking at, while it keeps track of how many times that particular URL has been retweeted by other Twitter users.
Sound familiar? If you look at the top of this post, you'll see that such a feature has existed for the past year and a half thanks to Tweetmeme. Beyond offering up these buttons to publishers, Tweetmeme also has a Digg-like front page of the most popular content from the sites that use it. Last month the company also launched a pro version of its service for large publishers that want to re-brand the look and feel of the dialog that comes up when you click on these buttons, as well as offering up support for integrating multiple analytics tracking tools.
Twitter's initial offering looks to be less expansive, though that could just be the beginning of something much larger. Tweetmeme charges up to $5,000 a year for publishers to use the paid versions of its service, so something competitive from Twitter later on down the line could make for an additional revenue stream.
Mashable thinks the service could be here as early as Thursday. In the meantime, the embed code for the new Tweet Button does not work on all Twitter user accounts.