When we launched TweetMeme in 2008, I never dreamed of how quickly our service would take off and the incredible reach it would have.

TweetMeme was built to curate and rank Twitter links and gained 10 million monthly users in just nine months. We were the first to create the iconic (green) retweet button that was installed on 500,000+ websites, with a peak serving of 1.5 billion daily retweet buttons.

We are now in the process of shuttering TweetMeme and I wanted to share the reasons behind this decision, along with next steps to guide you.

TweetMeme was the first website to show the true power of curating news from Twitter. For millions of users, it was a homepage that showed a truly democratized view of what was popular on the Internet. Many stories broke first on TweetMeme as we cared more about the virality of a story, rather than who was saying it. When the plane landed in the Hudson River in New York, TweetMeme was the first to break the news on its homepage.

Three years on and the consumer news market has moved on and our core business DataSift has now grown to over 10,000 users, offices in 4 cities, $14m in investment and an amazing ecosystem of applications built upon it. We will be sad to see TweetMeme go, but it is no longer competitive or cost effective for us to continue to keep the infrastructure going behind it.

We have done our absolute best to ensure that the shutdown of the free TweetMeme API is as easy as possible for everyone. The shutdown of the free API which allows anyone to look up retweet counts and resolve short links to full links, is already in effect. Here is the timeline for the remaining steps as we wind down TweetMeme:

Buttons and API

Today whitelisted API will be shutdown and all whitelisted users will lose access to the /url_info end-point.

It has been two years since Twitter launched their own button and as part of the final TweetMeme transition, the TweetMeme button will over the next 24 hours be switched over to the Twitter button (the ‘web’ TweetMeme button will immediately look like Twitter buttons). Please note that this will happen automatically and no action needs to be taken from your end.

A few other important notes:

• The Retweet Button will lose some functionality when transitioning to the Twitter Button. The parameters tweetmeme_alias, tweetmeme_service, tweetmeme_service_api and tweetmeme_space are deprecated.
• In certain situations we advised to manually install the TweetMeme button using an iFrame, unfortunately this button will no longer be operational and will not be converted to a Twitter button. Sites will need to replace the embed code with Twitter’s own.
• The Image Button used within RSS feeds is being dropped.
• The Follow Button is being dropped.
• Our WordPress plugin will be switched to only use the Twitter button. As such, we strongly encourage you to upgrade the WordPress plugin when prompted from your dashboard.

Website

On the 1st October the TweetMeme website will be fully shut down.

Thanks

Thanks for your support as a TweetMeme user – it’s been a great ride. To learn more about DataSift, I encourage you to visit datasift.com. I also welcome you to stay in touch by following me on Twitter @nik and tuning into our DataSift blog.

In response to feedback from some of our larger publishers, we are proud to announce the launch of TweetMeme Pro.

TweetMeme continually looks to improve its service and develop new ways for our publishers to integrate seamlessly. The company has grown substantially over the past year and now serves in the region of 700M buttons per day on around 250,000 sites.

We understand that it is important to provide the option of delivering a branded experience for its users through improved delivery and the ability to customise the button.

The TweetMeme Pro Button provides support for:

• Up to 10 UTM tracking codes within the button
• Customisation on the design of the button
• Customisation on the design of the pop-up box
• Dedicated servers to ensure high reliability and performance
• The best user + publisher Retweet experience*
• 100% accurate Retweet counts*
• URL Shortener Support (including BIT.LY Pro)*
• Web, RSS, Email and Mobile support*
• Support for HashTags + Whitespace*
• International language support*

The TweetMeme Pro solution means you will be able to track the performance of tweets made through the button, and deliver a fully branded experience to your users.

Existing sites already using the TweetMeme Pro solution include:

As of today we are already serving 80 million Pro buttons daily using a combination of co-location and dedicated servers. TweetMeme’s hosting partner, DediPower, not only supports the 700 million standard retweet buttons that we serve each day, but also provides the high capacity, on-demand infrastructure required to cope with our growing Pro and standard button-base.

To find out how you can use TweetMeme Pro please take a look at our website or sign-up.

* – Features also included in the standard TweetMeme Retweet Button.

Our World Cup 2010 Channel continues to bring in the latest and greatest on World Cup news from Twitter. We have had a great mix of content from official score reportings being tweeted straight after the match is over, to some fantastic World Cup viral gems.

A big shout to our channel sponsor AT&T who have done a fair share of work making this channel what it is today. Be sure to check out their featured tweets and ‘Cup Buzz’ to get more World Cup 2010 news.

Here is a top 10 of the most popular World Cup tweets in the past 7 days

10. Australia-Serbia – The matches of 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa
9. World Cuo 2010: Nicolas Anelka misses France training
8.  World Cup instant Twitter replay: how we did it
7. Capello ‘to quit if England fail to reach last 16
6. FIFA may sit Slovenia-U.S. referee
5. The Best Website Designs of the 2010 World Cup
4. 2010 World Cup: South African man killed by wife, kids for changing TV to Germany
3. Top 10 World Cup Twitter Trends [CHART]
2. Algeria star slaps female reporter
1. USA vs Algeria World Cup Match Could Set New Internet Traffic Record

By the way is anyone else impressed by John Terry’s commitment by diving, face first, in a true fish like move to save England from a slovenian shot?

Why not take a look at our other Channels? If you want to take advantage of sponsoring a Channel like AT&T, just give us a shout!

The TweetMeme Wiki is now live for those of you who would like to help translate the TweetMeme plug-in to other languages. It doesn’t matter how big or small the contribution is, we appreciate it all. We hope to have completed full translations for as many different languages as you the community provide very soon.

You can find the wiki at: tweetmeme.wikispaces.com

Editing privileges is available to members of the wiki only, so a quick sign-up on the site will allow you to start contributing there and then.

Current languages available to help translate:
Arabic, Bengali, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

We are also open to languages not currently shown on the wiki, just edit away using the same template layout as our other languages.  If there are any translations that people feel need discussion please do this on the discussion section of the page where there is a discrepancy.

We are fast approaching a major milestone in Retweet Buttons and within weeks we will have passed being live on over 200,000 websites. In conjunction we have recently passed serving 500 million button impressions daily. To assist our continued growth we are today releasing a major update to the button to include international language support.

Two parts of the button have translation features,

Firstly the button itself and the pop-up you get when you click to do the retweet are now translated into 7 languages English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese and Portuguese. We will then be putting up an area to crowd source the translations to other languages.

Secondly we have integrated Google Translate to automatically translate any stories you retweet into your own language. This automatically detects if translation is required and prompts you when it has made the change, it is a simple one-click to revert the translation if that is not what you desire.

The new language support is on top of an impressive feature set,

• The best user and publisher retweets experience
• URL Shortener Support (including BIT.LY Pro)
• Mobile Phone Support (iPhone, Android)
• Image Button – that allows the embedding into RSS + Emails
• Spaces – allows you to control how many white spaces you leave at the end of the tweet
• Hash Tag support

If you are website owner you can read all the technical details of the changes on our help page, if you want to install the button from scratch visit our installation page.

UPDATE

As some of you who already use our button with the language translation are already aware we initially released our translations as an opt out, due to the popular demand for an opt in process instead we have now swapped that around so you can now opt into your tweets being translated into your local language.

We’re pleased to announce that the TweetMeme Button Chrome Extension is now available for download from the Chrome Extensions website.

The extension allows you to take a little version of the TweetMeme Button with you everywhere on the web, showing live tweet counts for pages you are viewing, as well as providing quick tweeting of whatever you’re currently looking at.

Our standard Retweet Button is massively popular, and over half a billion of them are seen every day across a huge range of websites. But that doesn’t mean there will always be a retweet button at hand when you need one. So with the Chrome Extension, as soon as you discover the next hot article, blog post, picture or video, with just a few clicks you can have your customised tweet dispatched to your followers.

Help and support for the extension is available on our help forum.

We are proud to announce that we shall be exhibiting at the Internet World conference next week!

Internet World is Europe’s longest running, best attended and biggest annual event for digital marketing and online business. The event will be packed with a host of great exhibitors, and hundreds of informative keynote and seminar sessions. The event is being held at Earls Court, London, from 27-29th April and entry is free – click here to register!

We will be positioned at stand number E3086, and will be there to talk all things TweetMeme including;

The Retweet Button
The Follow Button
Channels
AdTweets
Featured Tweets

Email us to book an appointment with a member of the TweetMeme team for anytime across the three days! We look forward to seeing you there!

Today we’re releasing a major upgrade to our platform that will significantly impact parts of our API. These changes are necessary to allow our platform to scale at the tremendous rate we’re seeing and provide vastly improved reliability.

/stories/tweets

The /stories/tweets API call now includes a “uuid” (a 32 char hex string) for each Tweet returned. This UUID represents the Tweets position within the timeline for that story. The from_id parameter, which used to accept the Tweet ID of the previous Tweet to page from now accepts the UUID of the previous Tweet to page from.  If you pass the Tweet ID instead, you will get an error.

This is the most disruptive change and only affects clients that page tweets. Your underlying paging logic can remain the same, but you will need to pass our API a different value for the from_id.

/stories/recent & /stories/popular

Both the /stories/recent and /stories/popular API calls will no longer accept a domain parameter. This is due to a performance issue that we have identified and we hope to restore this functionality in the coming months.

The Stories API docs have been updated with these changes, please refer to them for more details and examples.

Sometime in February our Retweet Button passed the 100,000 mark in website installs. We launched the Retweet Button back in February 2009 – so we have achieved this milestone in 12 months. We also peaked at 300 million retweet buttons served in one day (thanks to the iPad) and in the last 30 days we have served over 7 Billion buttons.

We are very proud to have some of the biggest brands on the internet using our services below are just a few of them.

Flash

I would also like to single out one company that has taken us into a whole new Arena, BREAK.COM worked with us to produce the very first Flash based Retweet Button, this has been a massive success for them increasing retweets by a factor of five. Look out for more innovation in this space.

New Functionality

To mark our milestone we are launching two really important bits of functionality that allow even more customization of the Tweets that are generated.

The first is HASHTAGS – we have long wanted to allow users to be able to tag each button so that users searching for relevant articles have a chance of finding them. You can now add one (or more) tags and we will automatically append them to the Tweet while still keeping within the 140 Character Limit. We are also pushing out an update today of our ever popular WordPress Plugin that adds automatic support for taking your WordPress TAGS and adding them to the Tweet Text.

Secondly we have added the ability to pre-allocate space at the end of the Tweet, it is a well known fact that Links get retweeted more when space is left at the end of the Tweet to then allow the next person to add the RT @[twitter_name] to the beginning, so from now on by default the Tweet will leave 19 characters, this can be overridden to give more or less space.

Both pieces of new functionality work on all our variants of the Button (Web, RSS, Mobile) and you can get all the details on HashTags and Tweet Space – or our main Button help page here.

Feature List

For those unaware of all the great abilities our button has here is a quick run-down on what makes us unique

• The Biggest and recognized Retweet Brand
• Installed on 100,000+ websites worldwide
• The best User + Publisher Retweet Experience
• 100% accurate retweet counts
• Support for 15 Different URL Shorteners
• Web, RSS, Email and Mobile support
• New support for HashTags + Whitespace

It always amazes me how things converge onto a point in what seems to be complete coincidence, but when it happens time and again you see that it is just a natural convergence of multiple minds pushing forward ideas towards a natural conclusion.

And so when I arrived at the Techcrunch Crunchup I was not surprised to find that a number of companies (including Twitter themselves ) would be talking about Twitter based advertising.

I was also at the Crunchup to announce our own new Twitter advertising model called Adtweets – which is a new ad-platform that allows established ad-networks to leverage the power of the retweet (something we feel we have extensive knowledge within.) by allowing current display adverts to gain a retweetable element. If you want to read the full details we have a separate post.

Retweet Analytics

I wanted to share some fascinating numbers on how content gets disseminated across twitter via Retweets, we recently launched our own Analytics package that allows individual stories to be analysed in great detail.

An interesting fact that has an immense impact for anyone trying to advertise on Twitter is that when I analysed 20 of the top tier Twitter accounts (e.g. with followers of more than 500,000) I found that on average only 35% of the retweets that a link gained were directly originated from their own Twitter account.

So as an example a recent Mashable story with 1598 retweets I found that only 586 were a direct result of their pushing it out to the@mashable Twitter account (which has 1,751,213 followers) and the largest proportion (825 of them) was in fact from originating retweets (e.g. clicking our retweet button).

The second interesting set of numbers is the click data that then results from all those retweets – again from the same story we find that it was clicked 12558 times (split across 5 different shortener services) of that total 8196 were direct (e.g. mostly from Twitter clients such as Seesmic, Tweetdeck) 2896 were from the Twitter.com and the 1539 were from 80+ other Twitter web based clients.

What do I draw from these facts? The first is that any model must be inclusive of external clients. So in the instance of Robert Scoble’s ‘SuperTweets‘ the Twitter clients will need a big incentive to display those adverts – e.g. a revenue share. My gut feeling is that in-tweet advertising is still the only effective route forward – just because it applies to the KISS principle.

My second conclusion is that distribution into the mainstream Twitter user-base is absolutely crucial to getting the message heard by the greatest number of users.

Lastly I would like to show you the kind of advertising that I think is the future – and that works perfectly with a model of retweeting. [disclosure: Sun Microsystems is a partner of TweetMeme]

Full details of our own advertising platform can be found here.