Broken, or Just Pointless

So, C|Net has implemented Echo to help foster the social aspects of their site. Now, I can understand wanting to get in on the FaceBook-esque dollars. I can even understand the Twitter love affair, to a degree. What I don't understand is, "what is the value add of Echo when all it's doing is listing pages of re-Tweets?" I mean, re-Tweets add nothing to "the conversation". Re-Tweets are garbage, from a conversational standpoint. When you're doing something akin to just saying "yeah", it doesn't really foster conversation. Echo, as implemented on C|Net just seems to be a way for them to display, "see, people think our stuff's good". If that's all they're gonna do, shouldn't they just put the old 1990's style hit-counters on their pages?