Post by David Pierce. Find me on Twitter.

Twitter is a giant resource. It’s full of a vast number of people, talking about a vast number of different things. From links to funny videos, to funny quotes and interesting notes, there are a lot of ideas and links circling around Twitter.

Because of this, Twitter’s in a position to begin to have its own version of Digg, and Tweetmeme is stepping into that void in a big way.

Tweetmeme aims to show the most popular links on Twitter, as counted by the number of times a particular link is tweeted. Often, these trends start with a big-name Twitterer sending out a link (@mashable is a popular one), and then people pick it up and send it to their own followers – this is called a retweet, and often starts with, in this case, “RT @mashable”.

Tweetmeme monitors the links on Twitter, and presents the most popular one in a Digg-like interface.  There’s a front page, with the current popular links; there’s also a link to the Top Tweets, the most popular links on Twitter in the last 24 hours (637 tweets leads the pack right now).

Popular tweets can be sorted into blogs, images, video and audio, making it even easier to find that awesome video everyone’s tweeting about. Or, just go to the home page and see the whole collection.

Every story comes with a “retweet this” button that will automatically load your Twitter page and put a link to that story in your status box. This way, it’s easier to be part of the trend than ever! Tweetmeme is an easy way to find and share cool stories of all kinds.

Underneath every story, you can see who tweeted that link most recently – a nice way to find new and interesting people on Twitter.

Here’s my worry about Tweetmeme, or rather about its users. It’s going to have the Digg effect of sending huge traffic to websites and crashing them, at least if it catches on. But, it’s going to lead to a few stories being tweeted far more often than they should be, just because they’re popular.

If 10,000 more people digg a story, it’s no skin off my back – I won’t notice the difference. If 10,000 more people tweet a link, suddenly my Twitter stream is going to be filled with tons of the exact same tweet, and that’s not an exciting prospect.

So long as users show some (mild) restraint, Tweetmeme is going to become a great source for finding the best of the Twitterverse, and for discovering new stories around the world. There’s Digg, and there’s Reddit: Tweetmeme just might be next.

Thoughts? Do we need another application telling us what’s popular?