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.

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.

Today are launching the really useful TweetMeme Twitter Follow Button, this feature will help you and your readers to find and follow one another on Twitter!  The button has been designed for simplicity and comes in three styles as shown below.  The Follow button does not redirect the user to Twitter it instead uses the Twitter OAuth access just like our ReTweet button.

The Follow Button also has a live counter so that you can see visually if the user is worth following just based upon the count and matches the style and ability of the TweetMeme ReTweet button.  The Follow button also knows who you are already following and shows the + sign to remind you to add the new users that you discover through the Follow Button.  After all it is also a comfort to know yes, I am already following them, or how did I forget to follow this user! I must add them!

Compact: 

Normal:

Square:

Once clicked on the follow button provides you with the following features:

• Twitter Profile Picture
• Real Name
• Twitter Username
• Twitter profile description
• Following / Follower Count
• Recent Links that have been retweeted

The button also integrates with three of the most popular Twitter user profiling systems to provide you with some great additional user analysis tools to help you decide whether you want to follow people.

Twitter Counter

Twitter Counter is a great way to visually understand how a Twitter user is gaining extra followers.

Twitalyzer

Twitalyzer lets you at a glance see how a Twitter user interacts, giving simple metrics on Engagement, Impact and Influence.

Twitter Grader

Twitter Grader takes a Twitter and compares you with every other Twitter user based upon power and reach and gives you a overall grade.

Alongside the new button which is currently available as Javascript for you to embed into your site, we have also created a WordPress Plugin and anticipate other plugins will follow.  The WordPress plugin is designed to dramatically increase the scope of the follow button by improving the take up by the ‘long tail’.

The plugin is an easy opportunity for users to use the button.  The plugin provides 3 useful features, the biggest of which is the ability to replace the standard comment avatar with a follow button. We also add in a WordPress sidebar widget and the ability to add the follow button to posts on a per-author basis.

Sidebar Widget

Settings

TweetMeme is launching Adtweets! Nick Halstead is at the Real-Time Crunchup in San Francisco today to reveal and demo our new, and exciting product! The idea behind this product was based around wanting to reward advertisers for using great, interactive and engaging adverts.  The Adtweets are a way of putting pressure on advertisers to improve the standard of adverts, and give the audience a chance to decide, and essentially vote, on what they like. Produce a good advert that your audience likes, and you can easily tap into the viral nature of Twitter and the ‘retweet effect’, which will then dramatically increase your reach.

The system is very simple and the TweetMeme Retweet Button can be integrated into any standard IAB advertisement size. Advertisers have the choice between our compact button, or our standard button…..and of course you can use our TweetMeme Analytics to easily monitor the success of your campaign. The Adtweets can be served on any website, as well as on TweetMeme.com. With the support of Federated Media there is a large pool of publishers able to give advertisers a targeted audience of  social media friendly readers, who are likely to retweet engaging adverts to their friends and Followers.

TweetMeme is also re-launching Featured Tweets….Even more powerful, to help promote particular stories, and encourage the sharing of important content to other Twitter users.  The potential value of the featured tweets was apparent in the first version, but there were some essential elements missing. After taking on board invaluable feedback from both users and customers, the service was suspended. It was back to the drawing board, and what has emerged is a new Featured Tweet system that sponsors can use to bring relevent news and stories quickly to the attention of the TweetMeme Community, who then have the opportunity to retweet the story to their Twitter Followers and so on.

The aim of this system is to give potentially viral stories a little helping hand. The improvements include better targeting of your Featured Tweet, analytics to track your story, a simple, easy to use interface, and a reduced number of sponsored stories per page.  The result? An immediate increase in exposure, an encouragement in the spread of content, increased traffic and more Twitter Followers – for sponsors….And a happier user base, with only 1 sponsored story per page.

Want to find out more, have any questions, or want to be one of the first to take advantage of this, please contact sales@tweetmeme.com!

We never rest on our laurels here at TweetMeme HQ and have been beavering away on a range of improvements. I wanted to give you a sneak peak at a few new buttons launching next week.

Firstly one big change we have already made is to remove the (via @tweetmeme) from the end of any retweets. This will give a little more room at the end of tweets to be retweeted again.

Image Button

The current retweet button is a clever little thing – it can redirect you to Twitter to retweet but also if your logged into TweetMeme (via OAuth) it sends the tweet behind the scenes and leaves you on the site you were currently browsing, this we call ‘one-click retweeting’. The downside is that Javascript can only live in certain places on the web, i.e. in a web browser.

We think there are lots of other places you may want to get retweeted from so we have come up with ‘image buttons’. These look identical to the current retweet button (an example is on the right) with the same live-retweet count, the big difference is that it is rendered as a image which means you can put it anywhere that you can put a normal image. Here are some ideas we had for using it,

• RSS Feeds – JavaScript does not work inside RSS (most RSS readers strip it out because of XSS security issues) so the button is perfect to allow your users to read your article and then retweet it.
• Emails – You can embed it into an HTML email to promote any link you like.
• WordPress.com – Some sites like wordpress.com do not allow you to embed Javascript, but you can use this button instead.

Domain Count

We wanted a way that sites could show off how much they are getting retweeted beyond just the individual story retweet counts. So we came up with the ‘Weekly Retweet’ chicklet, it shows the weekly total number of retweets for your whole website. The counter re-calculates every 24 hours and the colour can be customized (examples on the right).

Analytics

Lastly we will be soon launching a much more detailed analytics package for website owners. You can already use TweetMeme to track the trend of a particular story (example here) and get the list of people who retweeted the story.

Websites can already track their weekly trends of retweets using TweetMeme (Example here) this is useful, but we wanted to give much more detail. The new package is aimed at fully understanding how your story spread and how you may adapt future story releases to take best advantage of Twitter and its amazing viral nature.

We are on the hunt for intersting, unusual or useful places where you are finding our re-tweet button.  This week has been no exception, interestingly we found that we are now on the Sky Blogs site of all places.  So if you happen to read any of the sky blogs like “The Weather Girls” for example then you can now re-tweet whatever they are talking about!

As you may have already heard we are also on Governor Schwarznegger’s newsroom pages where you can read about his suggestion of replacing textbooks with digital books.  Interestingly that particular story was re-tweeted via our button a number of times and the news of his announcement was debated over on our local radio station BBC Radio Berkshire.  Personally I’m not so sure that completely doing away with paper books is the answer but a combined mix of online text and traditional books is the best solution for me.  I wonder if the local radio station knew that he uses our button too?!  It’s funny how stories end up travelling around the world and mix with local news too.

I’ll be watching the Sky Blogs and looking out for their stories and news popping up on our local radio station or in other random places!  You never quite know where the next hot story will come from these days and Twitter has proven that time and time again.

We’re constantly looking out for sites that are using our button… anything from the most bizarre, obscure or most amusing use of our button on a site!  Where have you seen the button in use?  Where are you finding it most useful?  Are you finding any sites where you wish they had the button?  If so tell us!  We love to hear your stories about the button!

(Random Fact:) 600 million TweetMeme buttons were served last month and we are possibly one of the largest growing re-tweet sites out there at the moment. Last month we grew 120% and we are now starting to see our button pop up all over the place.

Today we updated the TweetMeme site with some new features and some UI changes.  We are hoping that this will help you find your way around the site easier and quicker as well as find additional information on re-tweets around your stories.

So first of all we added the Follow on Twitter link.  This gives users the ability to follow a specific channel or the top level TweetMeme accoount.  You’ll find the Follow next to our Subscribe button and under the Sign in area on the top right of the page.

Secondly we’ve made it easier to find our channels on TweetMeme.  So now you can find our channels in our sub menu next to the Live button, as well as down the right hand side of our site showing the top channels on TweetMeme.

We have a variety of different channels that may be of interest to our readers including the recently added World Wide Developer Conference Channel and the Le Mans racing channel amongst others.

And finally we’ve done an update on our TweetMeme button.  The basics of the button remain the same, it still does the re-tweets via the re-tweet section of the button, but now we’ve also linked the top part of the button to the story page on TweetMeme relating to that story.  This means that people can see the most recent re-tweets from people and the trending graph of re-tweets for that story.

We hope you like the updates and if you find any bugs or have any suggestions relating to these new features then please let us know over on our forum.

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!