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.

We are happy to announce that we have added two new Windows Live Writer Plugins to our offering with the help and support of the Live Writer developer community.  Our thanks go out to Scott Lovegrove who has carefully and lovingly created the Windows Live Writer TweetMeme plugin for WordPress.com along with the Windows Live Writer Follow Button Plugin.  Whilst he was on a role and doing these new plugins he also updated the much loved Windows Live Writer TweetMeme plugin to include support for hashtags.

We hope you like the plugins and if you are a developer and want to do cool stuff with our API’s then please do take a peak at our developer documents!  Tell us about your great creations and we’ll give you the spotlight!

Further to the TweetMeme Blogger Gadget introduced last week, we are increasing our support for Blogger users with a new template editor.

We realise that the positioning of the Gadget in the Sidebar isn’t ideal, as many would prefer it inline with their posts, so to overcome this you can use our new tool to insert the button directly into your blog template. The editor is also good news for bloggers using “Classic” templates to whom gadgets aren’t available.

To get your template code for editing, simply go to Layout then Edit HTML in your dashboard, and copy your complete template from within the textarea ([Ctrl+A] then [Ctrl+C] works well). If you are using advanced templates, please ensure the Expand Widget Templates box is ticked, though our editor will tell you if you forgot!

Once you’ve found and copied your template code you can start using the TweetMeme Blogger Template Editor.

With the addition of the editor, we’ve decided to bundle Blogger support in to a new Blogger menu page from which you can find the Gadget, the Template Editor, and a guide for manual editing.

Ever wished it was a little simpler to add our retweet button to your blog?  Well in continuing our steps to making your lives easier we’re pleased to announce the TweetMeme TypePad Widget!  There is now a new page in the plugins section of the site which has all the great options to customise your button and how it retweets, and even has a live preview so you can see how it will all look before it’s added to your TypePad blog.

Unfortunately TypePad’s API only allows widgets to be added to those blogs using Drag-and-Drop Design Templates so if you are using Advanced Templates you will, for the moment at least, need to continue using the manual insert method described in our help page How to Add a TweetMeme Button to your TypePad Blog.

Head over to the TweetMeme TypePad Widget page to customise your button and get it added to your blog!
By default, the widget will be installed at the bottom of your side-bar but you are free to re-organise if you wish through the Organize Content section of your Design tab.

Support for many more sites is on the way.

I wrote a little while back that we would be soon launching some new variants of our popular retweet button. We have had the new versions in test since then and can today announce their public availability.

RSS & Email

The current Retweet Button is designed to be embedded in web pages and uses Javascript to make it do a few clever things (such as logged-in retweeting). The problem with Javascript is that it cannot be used within RSS or Emails as most RSS & email clients strip Javascript for security reasons. So we came up with the idea of rendering our button as an image which would allow you to embed it anywhere that would accept an image. We hope this new variant of the button will help you get even more retweets.

You can read how to implement the RSS button, and how to the implement the Email Button.

Plugin

To make life easier we have added support for the RSS button to our WordPress plug-in – if you already have the plugin installed you will see a whole load of new options including the new RSS functionality, you can turn it on/off and also position it separately within the RSS.

Shortening Services

We also previewed last week that we were adding support for choosing your own short url service. This has also now gone live and you can read the full instructions. We already support 11 services (listed below) plus 3 services in which you can also supply an API key so that the data is private to yourself. If you run one of these services which is not supported please get in touch.

• bit.ly – (API support coming soon.)
• awe.sm – (API supported)
• cli.gs – (API support coming soon.)
• digg.com (API supported)
• is.gd
• TinyURL.com
• tr.im
• su.pr – (API supported)
• ow.ly – (API support coming soon.)
• lopurls.us
• twurl.nl

Plugin

If you are using the WordPress Plug-in already you will find settings to specify the shortener.

WordPress Statistics

Lastly you will notice that we have added a whole new page within our WordPress plug-in that gives statistics about retweeting for your last 5 posts. This gives you the 24 hour retweet trend graph for each story and a list of twitter users who have tweeted the story (useful in getting back in touch with those users who like your content.)

Success

We would like to thank everyone who has so far installed our button, we are currently serving over 50 million button impressions per day and it continues to grow daily. If you have any feedback on the new features please drop us a comment or head over to our discussion forum.

The new retweet chicklet is now live! what is it? It shows the total number of retweets that a particular website gets in the course of a single week. It comes in the standard 88x26px size and you can customize the colour of the chicklet to suite your website design.

We think this is a great simple addition to our other widgets and buttons and hope people will proudly display their retweet count for all to see.

How

We have made it dead simple for you to embed, just go to this page and type in the domain of your website, click on the RGB color value to pick a different colour, hit the ‘generate button’ and when your happy with the results cut and paste the HTML onto your own website.

Show Us

When you have added the chicklet please drop a comment back on this post so we can highlight some of the best sites in a future blogpost

Having been down to the Channel 4 Education event earlier in the week which I have to say was an outstanding event.  It left a lot of food for thought and got me thinking.  As a result I’m looking into what we should be putting into an Education category and have just created a Moodle channel which is starting to fill out with content.

I’m hoping that this will become a useful resource for those in education or other areas that will find the content useful.  If anyone can think of any other channels then do let me know…

Today we got a really great e-mail into our inbox!  Lee Turner who is part of the B2Evolution community has created a B2Evolution Plugin that does the equivalent to our wordpress plugin but for the B2Evolution blog engine.  This means that those users who have been asking about how to integrate our button with B2Evolution can now have a nice simple way to do so.  You’ll find all the information on how to install and use this plugin over on Lee’s TweetMeme plugin page.

Please direct any feedback of bug reports that you have back to Lee.  This still leaves us with TypePad and better Blogger integration to go.  We’re also looking into getting our plugin into WordPress.com but we will be needing the help of the community for that one as we need to know how many of our users are wanting to install it into their WordPress.com sites!  We’ll come back soon with a post for you to register your interest in the WordPress.com integration!

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!

Thanks to Rob Loach over at Drupal you can now add the Re-Tweet Button into your Drupal CMS via this module. Please do take a look if you are running Drupal and want to integrate the button.

Any feedback on this plugin should be given on the Drupal Module site.