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.

Today we launched our Justin Bieber channel.  We’ve seen so many of your Bieber fans out there commenting on content on TweetMeme that you now have your very own Justin Bieber Channel full of fan and news content sorrounding Justin Bieber and his music.  We’re always looking to see what communities need channels of content and it certainly seems like the Justin Bieber fans need somewhere to share their support for the young star.

Key features of the channel are the ability to comment (and of course retweet that comment to your friends) and have conversations with those who have left comments. You can even put our little green retweet button on your own fan site by grabbing the embed code from here.

Yesterday we put together a shiny new TweetMeme Channel called UK Snow to track the top stories being linked to from Twitter.  Initially we created this for our own staff to keep a track of what was happening with the snow in and around Berkshire to know when we should all head home so that we could get back safely.  Well we are all back safely and the channel is still there with some great content around the snow and weather in the UK.

Over night last night  we set up the hosting of the channel to the url http://uk-snow.com so that you can all find it nice and easily.  The channel contains all the latest information and news on the snow situation within the UK.  Reports of news are coming from both traditional and community sources, along with the latest forecast information from the MetOffice and other weather sources within the UK.

We hope that this will help you find interesting news about the snow and weather conditions as well as provide you with the latest information on the severe weather warnings and advisory notices.  The bit I find most interesting is the images as you can see across the country the extent of the snow!

Please help us spread the word so that others may find this useful resource!

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 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.

Since the healthcare industry is so large and because the healthcare news and top stories aren’t just about swine flu we decided that it would be a good idea to create a healthcare channel on TweetMeme.  On this you will find anything from swine flu to taxation changes sorrounding the industry.

If there is a channel that you think would be a useful addition to our site then do let us know by leaving a comment here.

Today we added the WordPress TweetMeme channel.  We decided that since there’s always so much news for those who design and develop blog sites using WordPress that it’s users would probably appreciate a channel where they can subscribe to all the hottest news on WordPress.  The channel contains announcements, new plugins, themes and design competition related links.  So if you are a developer or designer and work with WordPress then this one is just for you!

We hope you like it and if you have any suggestions for a new channel then do just leave a comment and you never know we may just put a channel up there just for you!