TweetMeme just announced that it is shutting down. If you’ll recall, they were responsible for the original retweet button, but over the years, Twitter effectively rendered the button useless for most sites, as more and more adopted Twitter’s official button.

That’s not all the company had to offer though. “TweetMeme was built to curate and rank Twitter links and gained 10 million monthly users in just nine months,” says founder and CEO Nick Halstead. “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.”

“TweetMeme was the first website to show the true power of curating news from Twitter,” he says. “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.”

He goes on to say that it’s no longer cost effective to keep TweetMeme running as it’s no longer competitive in the consumer news market. He will continue to focus on DataSift, which offers tools for collecting, filtering and analyzing data from social media. DataSift, Halstead says, has grown to over 10,000 users, and has offices in 3 cities, $14 million in investment, and an ecosystem of applications built upon it.

The TweetMeme API will be shut down, and the TweetMeme button will be switched over to the official Twitter button over the next 24 hours. This will happen automatically, and those using TweetMeme buttons won’t have to do anything.

The TweetMeme site will be fully shut down on October 1.