Twitter is pushing ahead with its busy pace of launches as it unveils an official retweet button called the “Tweet Button” as it puts more of its own stamp on the web and replaces third party developers.

The Tweet Button is likely to be widely adopted by publishers and bloggers and will replace the existing retweet button produced by third party developer Tweetme.

It had been thought that the launch of an official Twitter retweet button would spell bad news for TweetMeme, but Twitter says it will be working with Tweetme. The developer will help Twitter “with the technical challenges involved” and on “delivering real-time curation of the Twitter Firehose”.

On its blog Tweetme said that it would be working on a number of new products the first of which is DataSift, which it said would give developers the ability to leverage cloud computing to build data from the millions of tweets sent every day.

Tweetme, whose green buttons have become ubiquitous across, says it had been racking up as many as 750 million daily retweet button impressions — impressions that will be coming Twitter’s way in future.

The launch of the button will open the way for Twitter to work more closely with publishers and eventually offer more services to them. The first of these will allow publishers that install the Tweet Button to suggest Twitter accounts for users to follow — allowing sites to suggest and promote different writers or accounts.

In a post on its blog Twitter said that despite the high volume of sharing there was plenty of scope for making it an easier and quicker process.

“Today we’re launching the Tweet Button to make sharing simple. It lets you share links directly from the page you’re on. When you click on the Tweet Button, a Tweet box will appear — pre-populated with a shortened link that points to the item that you’re sharing.”

“After you post to Twitter, you may see suggestions for accounts to follow. These accounts are suggested by the web site you visited and may include, for example, the news outlet and reporter of the article you shared.”

The launch of the Tweet Button follows that of Facebook and its “Like Button”, which has been widely adopted across the web making Facebook much more visible. That signalled part of Facebook’s efforts to push itself out into the wider web.

Twitter is pursuing a similar strategy as it takes ownership of tools and services that have until now been provided by third party developers in the Twitter eco system. The recent key developments have been:

1. Twitter buys Tweetie the third-party Twitter app for the iPhone an it its official app in April;

2. The announcement that it launch its own URL shortener to challenge Bit.ly in June

3. The launch of its official Blackberry Twitter app;

4. Plus a string of other developments at Twitter including last week’s who to follow announcement.