When news broke earlier this week that Twitter was going to launch its own “tweet button”, many were quick to predict the death of TweetMeme, which already provides similar badges to many websites.

But while the British start-up has ceded its own retweet button (750m served every day, until now), it has if anything emerged stronger, with a rare deal, to reach into the heart of the realtime Twitter “firehose” – and build a new set of services on top of the micro-communications service.

If TweetMeme’s positive spin on losing its most visible piece of marketing is right, and it’s got low-cost, preferential access to Twitter’s data, it sets a benchmark that TweetDeck, Twitpic, Bit.ly, TweetUp and many other third-party developers might hope to emulate, as Twitter sucks up features and applications previously provided by its ecosystem. Read more