TweetMeme shutting down October 1

A relic of the long-gone era of third-party apps filling Twitter holes, TweetMeme, a four-year-old service that surfaces top Twitter content, will be closing its doors on October 1.

“We are now in the process of shuttering TweetMeme,” CEO and founder Nick Halstead announced in a nostalgic blog post that reflects on the rise and fall of the web application. “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.”

TweetMeme ranks and displays links shared on Twitter based on their popularity. The company, which attracted 10 million monthly users in its first nine months, also invented the first embeddable retweet button. The button was placed on more than 500,000 websites before Twitter’s official retweet button obscured the predecessor.

But the TweetMeme team, perhaps seeing the writing on the wall, shifted its attention to its DataSift social data platform long ago. DataSift will take center stage as TweetMeme takes to its grave.

“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,” Halstead wrote.

The TweetMeme API is going dark today, and the TweetMeme button will be switched over to the Twitter button during the next 24 hours. The TweetMeme website will cease to exist on October 1.

Dead bird image via Shutterstock