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 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 continually listen to what publishers want and a repeat request is to support mobile users. The problem with mobile is that a large proportion of users use Twitter applications to do their tweeting. So today we would like to announce that we are supporting native retweeting on iPhone Android and Blackberry.

When we serve a retweet button to a mobile browser we switch it to a mobile specific version – and when the user clicks the button it sends them to a screen that lets them choose the mobile application that they use. And for users who do not yet have a Twitter app – we suggest a few to use. And if you do use Twitter on your mobile browser we can redirect to that as well. And of course we remember your choice for any further retweeting.

And just a quick reminder why we server over 120 million retweet buttons a day.

• 80% of our users now use our OAuth retweet button, this means that the user never leaves your website.
• Support for 15 Short URL services
• Support for RSS / Email buttons
• Free Retweet Analytics + PRO Analytics
• The recognised brand for retweeting

Look out for the new release early next week.