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.

Back at the beginning of 2009 we produced a little green web button that counted how many times users shared a link on Twitter. We started out with a simple idea ‘How can we get more people to share content on Twitter’ – and today we return to that simple thought.

We have grown to more than 750 million daily retweet button impressions, which for a tiny team is an amazing achievement. That said the market requires an official solution that can accelerate this growth. So today Twitter is launching its own Tweet Button and we are very pleased to be partnering with them to continue to grow the overall Twitter ecosystem.

What does this mean? Firstly we will be assisting Twitter with the technical challenges involved with the button and secondly we will be working even more closely in the future on delivering real-time curation of the Twitter Firehose. This will manifest itself in the launch of a number of new products and the first of these is being unveiled today.

DataSift gives developers the ability to leverage cloud computing to build very precise streams of data from the millions and millions of tweets sent every day.

• Tune tweets through a graphical interface or our bespoke programming language
• Streams consumable through our API and real-time HTTP
• Comment upon and rank streams created by the community
• Extend one or more existing streams to create super streams

Find out more on the new DataSift blog or follow @datasift

For press enquiries send emails to press (at) tweetmeme.com

UPDATE:

Robert Scoble has posted a video interview with Nick Halstead, Founder of TweetMeme discussing the Twitter Buttons and the new product DataSift.

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.

10:32:40 AM: Today we will be doing a maintenance update of our TweetMeme site #TweetMemeV2 as we know you like to know what’s going on we’re tweeting it

10:36:55 AM: Looks like we’re all set to get started!

10:39:08 AM: TweetMeme is now down and the buttons will be up for now still.

10:39:44 AM: And the buttons that are new will show the Maintenance button #TweetMemeV2

10:40:01 AM: System back up done! #TweetMemeV2

10:44:27 AM: Now for the big stuff! #TweetMemeV2

10:51:46 AM: Why is it that the post arrives mid upgrade and live tweet! It seems to all be going very smoothly so far… Fingers Crossed #TweetMemeV2
10:55:52 AM: Now for the code updates… they look like they are upgrading OK atm… The dev team are checking they are all there! #TweetMemeV2

11:01:59 AM: So what does everyone think of the new logo ? You’ll see we’ve updated it over on the TweetMeme twitter account http://retwt.me/pN
11:04:31 AM: TweetMeme will be back soon! http://bit.ly/ClXQy
via @tweetmeme

11:04:43 AM: TweetMeme Maintenance Live Update http://bit.ly/wnNjX
via @tweetmeme

11:07:17 AM: Do we want more pics of the team working hard? #TweetMemeV2

11:12:42 AM: So you’ve already seen Alex doing his thing… Now for Nick T our in house Mylie Cyrus fan… #TweetMemeV2 http://twitpic.com/fjwqd

11:16:04 AM: I have a feeling @nicktelford is probably going to hide now he’s been outed! http://is.gd/2DJ99

11:19:53 AM: If you’re wondering what’s going on we’re still upgrading. It does take a while to do though! The team have been working hard! #TweetMemeV2

11:24:12 AM: You should hear the silence in the office as everyone is beavering away! Just the tap tapping of keyboards! #TweetmemeV2

11:39:37 AM: Checking our spam filter settings & a few other bits now…#TweetmemeV2

11:50:40 AM: We’re now testing everything to make sure it’s all working properly!

12:01:44 PM: We can hear the dull tones of #readingfestival from our offices! I’m amazed we can hear it as it’s a few miles away! #TweetMemeV2

12:08:03 PM: Team motivation to get the site back up online #TweetMemeV2 http://twitpic.com/fjzzn

12:11:04 PM: RT @alexforrow: @talkTweetMeme http://twitpic.com/fjv3c – Yeah makes me look like some kind of milk addict <- he’s our milk fiend!

12:11:53 PM: RT @stewarttownsend: http://bit.ly/u9SNK The Story of Tweetmeme #tweetmemev2

12:33:54 PM: We have content in our test area! And are looking to go live very, very soon!

12:50:15 PM: The first thing to go online will be our API. THe rest will follow.

1:27:05 PM: The buttons should be starting to come back up and the API should be working but is currently rate limited.

5:49:09 PM: Not quite as simple an update as we hoped but buttons are being served & the API is running. The site update is a bit tricker but is coming

7:39:42 PM: And finally the main site is about to go live! Wait for it! …..

7:42:11 PM: We’ll be doing a count down!

7:42:35 PM: 3, 2, 1, go!

7:45:59 PM: http://tweetmeme.com

7:47:37 PM: Thanks to all the TweetMeme team for all their hard work today! I know it’s been a long hard few weeks getting it all finished!
7:54:41 PM: We hope everyone likes it and do let us know about any site bugs over on the forum http://help.tweetmeme.com/forum

TweetMeme is currently unavailable as we are performing a system upgrade.

This will have an impact on the service we provide, so please read this post carefully before you post any support requests at this time.  Please read on to find out how this will impact you.

User Impact

First of all, all webpages at TweetMeme.com will display a holding page until the upgrade is complete.  The API will also also be down, but will still return a failure message in the requested format. Buttons displayed on websites will exhibit one of a number of behaviours, so please examine these carefully before you ask for support for a broken button.
Button Behaviours

If your URL was known to TweetMeme before the upgrades began, we will still attempt to serve the last known Retweet count on your button. When users click on the Retweet part, they will be directed to Twitter where they can post the Tweet about the story. However, during the period of downtime, button counts *will not* increment as you would usually expect. When we come back online we will try our best to retrieve as many Tweets that were posted while we were offline as possible, however we will miss some of them (we estimate about 10 minutes worth). The button counts will start changing again as we come back online after the upgrades are complete.

If your URL was not know to TweetMeme before the upgrades started, you will see a special TweetMeme button with a spanner icon instead of the usual count. This is expected behaviour and will be displayed until the upgrade is complete and TweetMeme picks up your URL, when it will start displaying Retweet counts as usual.

There may also be some buttons displaying question marks, these will be picked up by TweetMeme and will begin displaying as expected when the upgrades are complete.

We’d like to thank everyone for their patience and understanding while these necessary upgrades are performed, and we hope you enjoy the improved functionality and response speed of the TweetMeme site and button in the future.

To follow our progress we will live tweet updates here: http://blog.tweetmeme.com and status updates for our services will be on http://status.tweetmeme.com

Prior to today we had a restriction on the TweetMeme Button that all tweets were re-tweeted as RT @tweetmeme with the exception of those on the whitelist where they could do RT @their_twitter_account which allowed the re-tweet to be from a specific twitter account/ user.  We got lots of feedback from our users… especially those who weren’t on the whitelist via our Forums and listened to their shouts!  I bet they thought we were ignoring them! (but no, we were working away to ensure that the updates worked perfectly.)

So now everyone is whitelisted and you can change it to RT @[your twitter name]. We have updated the instructions on the Button page and we have also updated the WordPress Plugin so that you change the twitter account easily. Once you have the plugin installed, go to Settings, TweetMeme and then set the Source to your twitter name. (e.g. talktweetmeme in my case) Don’t include the @ otherwise it’ll be @@talktweetmeme which wouldn’t really work.

We hope you like the update and the power it gives you as a user to see who is re-tweeting your stories and articles.  It should also mean that you could create conversation around the stories online if you add those re-tweeting your stories as friends on twitter.  I’m sure people will come up with all sorts of useful ways of using this new and very much requested feature!

Please do give us feedback and new feature requests on our Forum.  We do read every request and we try to do those that are of value to many people as soon as we can!

TweetMeme is having a service update at the moment and will be back up shortly. You’ll see the buttons on your sites showing the ? but don’t worry as soon as the database is back online and available we’ll be servicing the button again.

Please don’t panic! It’ll all be just fine!