Facebook, you should really be ashamed of yourself this time.

It's one thing to rip off features from Twitter - Twitter's a big, burly company with some hard-hitting people on their board. When you rip them off, it's like you're flattering them, because it doesn't actually threaten them too much, and everyone knows you're doing it.

But ripping off Tweetmeme? C'mon, that's like a schoolyard bully stealing the little guy's lunch money. Tweetmeme isn't Twitter - they're a Twitter application, designed and developed by third-party developers, who (I'm guessing) worked pretty hard to create the awesome site that they've made (disclaimer: we use Tweetmeme's Retweet Badge here on Twittown).

I'm talking about Facebook's new "Share Badge," which shows how many times a particular article has been shared (retweeted) on Facebook. It's all part of Facebook's attempt to become more like Twitter - except this time it's really shameless. Check out a side-by-side comparison of the two badges:

Now, c'mon - that can't be a coincidence. Facebook's Share Badge has exactly the same layout, all the way down to the little dialogue bubble coming off the top of the share button.

But wait - you say. Maybe it's not that simple. Maybe Facebook just took their idea and ran with it. After all, they wouldn't just shamefully steal the image and superimpose their Facebook Share badge right over it, would they?

Actually, yes they would. The Facebook Share badge is EXACTLY the same height as the Tweetmeme Retweet Badge.

'Cause everyone knows that 61 pixels is such a normal dimension in the world of social networking - I mean everything's 61 pixels, right? 'Cause it's...a prime number.

Look, Facebook, the least you could have done was slightly change the image somehow so that it wasn't so glaringly obvious that you stole the idea and the layout from Tweetmeme. When you do stuff like this, it makes you seem...desperate, and that's not how that the world's largest social network should be coming across to its customers.

Someone recently referred to Facebook as the "Microsoft of Social Networking." Given both companies rich histories of stealing ideas and code from their competition, I guess that description is becoming more and more accurate.

Whether or not people actually USE the new Facebook "Share Badge," remains to be seen. Sharing something on Facebook isn't quite as simple as retweeting something on Twitter, and so far, Facebook sharing hasn't taken off in the way that its designers intended to. Clearly the Facebook Share Badge is an attempt to increase the amount of sharing done on the social network, in an attempt to stave off Twitter's status as the current aggregator of choice for most hardcore sharers.

The new Facebook "Share Badge" should start popping up all around the internet in the coming days; ironically, on most websites, it'll probably get placed right next to the Tweetmeme retweet badge that they stole the idea and layout from.