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The big news on the Web this morning is Twitter's announcement of the Tweet Button - an official version of popular buttons seen on countless blogs and websites. Twitter has been working on developing its own button for some time now and has employed the help of TweetMeme, makers of the widely used "retweet button," to work out the kinks for its new system. Interestingly enough, however, TweetMeme seems to be making a significant gear shift today, as they have announced a new real-time Twitter analytics product, DataSift.

Twitter, the popular microblogging service, announced today that its latest feature, the Tweet Button, has gone live. Twitter is partnering with Tweetmeme, the company responsible for the majority of retweet buttons on the Web for the past year and a half, in offering a simple way for users to share content wherever they go.

According to Twitter, nearly a quarter of all tweets include a link and, until now, they have been shared using third-party services or by "copying and pasting, link shortening, and bouncing between browser tabs" which the company calls "just too much work".

While the majority of Twitter users reside within the United States, there is also a massive international population of users sharing info and links in various languages around the world. Tweetmeme, a service for sharing and tracking links on Twitter, announced today that it serves a half of a billion retweet button impressions each day on nearly 200,000 websites worldwide. To keep up with this growth, and the international Twitter community, the service is rolling out support for languages on buttons as well as automatic translation for retweets made on its site.

In the kids book "George Saves the World by Lunchtime", George saves the world through recycling. His four tips are reduce, repair, reuse and recycle. When Toyota decided to build Toyota Conversations Powered by Tweetmeme, they applied the same approach. The collaboration is about more than simply utilizing a social media tool to reach out to customers. It also allows Toyota to meet business objectives like reducing resources, while at the same supporting customer-friendly initiatives such as transparency and engagement.

Auto manufacturer Toyota launched a new Twitter-based portal called Toyota Conversations tonight and the site is getting a whole lot of press. Most people are focused on how the site seems to contain more positive Tweets than the world at large, but there are a lot of negative links on the site as well.

We got a look at the back-end infrastructure of the Tweetmeme portal system and have screenshots displayed below. These aren't for the Toyota project in particular, but they are the same tools being put to use in a different campaign. We know you feed and data geeks fantasize about building the ultimate feed moderation system. Check out the one that Toyota put down no small sum to get to use. It's a nice combination of heavy duty and easy to use, just like you'd expect for a big corporate customer like this. The best news? This system will be opened up to the public soon.

Swedish marketing technologist Dennis Hettema has created a hot-item tracking website for the most-shared items on Google Buzz, called Buzrr. The site is very simple right now, it doesn't include categories, there's no description of how it works ("we are jumping through a bunch of hoops," Hettema says) and the "new buzz" column is already full of spam. People love this kind of thing, though, so check it out.

Tweetmeme had similar beginnings and is now quite an impressive little company. Google Buzz has a lot of potential, and Buzzr is worth watching too.

If there's a hard-to-reach person you want to meet, one of the best ways to do so is through their friends. That's true in the offline world and the increasingly social nature of the internet may make discovery of the social circles of key influencers a powerful business practice online.

A new class of tools intended to surface influencers and the people they are influenced by are focusing on a hub of rapid, connected conversation that's wide open for analysis - Twitter. Could analysis of individual behavior on Twitter become a valuable tool for business development and marketing? A growing number of startup companies are making a case that it could.

If you were a little blue bird, with a good pile of money and a whole lot of hype, what would you buy to spice up your nest? There are so many little services being built on top of Twitter that we wouldn't be surprised to see some more of them acquired by the company soon. That would mean more features for everyday users and more usefulness for features loved by loyal early adopters.

Twitter has acquired two other companies so far, that we know of. Search engine and sentiment analysis service Summize became Twitter's own search engine and Values of N sold its assets so engineer Rael Dornfest could be brought into the company. Here are ten other startups we think that Twitter should consider acquiring next. Which kind of company would you most like to see become part of Twitter itself? We've got a poll below.

Tweetmeme, a memetracker that tracks popular retweets on Twitter, just launched a real-time version of its service that displays tweets that are currently in heavy rotation on the popular microblogging service. In order to filter this constant stream of messages, Tweetmeme users can choose to only see messages that have been retweeted at least twice, though the default setting is for five retweets and can go up to twenty.

TweetMeme is simple in concept: aggregate the number of times a certain blog URL, picture, video, or sound file is linked to on Twitter and rank them in order. The site is clean, fast and easy to use. But what it didn't have before was a way to make any money.