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Tweeght is a new site described by it’s creator as offering Digg-like voting for ‘thoughtful tweets’ – although the voting is actual more like Reddit with a simple up or down arrow.

Tweeght - new ranking site for Twitter

It was built by Aditya Kothadiya in under a week, and is pretty simple to use. You can either post a tweet by submitting it on the site, which requires your Twitter username and password, tag Tweets with #tweeght, #thought, or #quote, or send the Tweet to @tweeght.

From the site, you can vote individual messages up or down, Retweet them, or reply – and there’s a Leaderboard of the most popular users.

Aditya says “The goal was to launch something quickly but it should be valuable, usable, beautiful and dead simple.” And you can follow Aditya at @adityakothadiya.

It’s definitely a nicely designed site, but is the timing right?

Previous attempts at social ranking sites for Twitter I previously covered, included Microblogging.com and Dwigger. Both have closed, with Dwigger shut for good, and Microblogging hinting that a new service will appear in the future.

Now I’m not the biggest fan of Digg, but I do see the value on social ranking/aggregation sites. I’m a reasonably frequent user of Stumbleupon, and I do use Delicious (although I’m taking a break until I can sort out my messy tagging!).

But I can see two major problems for this approach to filtering Twitter -

1. The scale of Twitter is hard to accurately judge, but the most generous estimates would put Twitter as a whole under the size of Digg’s monthly active users.

2. Social aggregation sites are useful for filtering the entire internet – over 133 million blogs monitored by Technorati, for example, plus mainstream media sites, video, images etc, etc. Has Twitter reached the point where it needs filtering in this way?

3. The ranking approach always involves viewing messages via an external site, taking you out of Twitter or your client. When you’re using Digg, Delicious or SU, you’re inside that community, whereas with Tweeght you need to have a seperate browser tab or window taking you out of the community stream to see what’s being rated.

4. Twitter is built on personal relevance and connections. I can’t help feeling that external ranking systems are a little web 1.0 for adding value. Would I rather see thoughtful tweets from people I’ve never contacted or followed, or would I rather see what my friends and contacts are saying, and have them highlighting anything they see which is thoughtful or brilliant.

That all said, Tweeght might have come along at the right time, with the recent huge rise in users driven by mainstream media coverage of Twitter – and some of those new users could be the Digg-type audience Tweeght needs. After all, Malcolm Gladwell makes a great case for success being hugely dictated by factors such as timing his recent book Outliers.

Not the catchiest title for a genre of sites, but it works! I’ve posted before on my other blog about why I’m not a huge fan of Digg, (and alternatives to it) but it’s silly to deny the fact it’s a hugely popular site and format, and that some of the issues I have are Digg specific.

And there are two sites offering microblogging aggregation. I found Microblogging.com via founder @ShaunMorton on Twitter.  It’s essentially a niche social news gathering site for microblogging, and there’s nothing wrong with that! One of my remarks about Digg was that it increasingly faces a challenge from niche focussed rivals. It’ll be interesting to see if microblogging has enough interest to build a critical mass.

Dwigger has been covered elsewhere, but in the spirit of retweeting it’s an aggregator of tweets themselves, and it also creates threaded conversations with images and even video. Which is an interesting idea, but I suspect slightly flawed. The reasoning behind Twitter is that my contacts will be the filter of relevancy and interest, so it seems counterintuitive to go and seek out what complete strangers are judging to be relevant or important except as an object of curiousity. And Twitter Search allows me to see if terms are popular by volume across the whole of Twitter, rather than the microcosm of Twitterati who also use Dwigger.

Dwigger is by Sift Partners, so I’ll try and drop them a line shortly and get a detailed explanation of what I might be missing, and I’ll keep the jurt out until then, but I’m not sure there’s enough of a mass of microbloggers for these types of service quite yet. Considering Digg runs on around 20 million+ users a month, Stumbleupon is hitting around 6 million registered, and Twitter is around the 2-3 million mark, Microblogging.com and Dwigger might need a fair bit of patience to capitalise on the new communication medium.