Good move Twitter. A couple of months ago, Twitter announced a change in direction, that was to focus more on building Twitter, no longer relying on the 3rd party software developers that had made them a success. Platforms after all are bigger than a single business.. right ?
This morning news arrives from Tech Crunch, that Twitter will pull out the cheque book and buy one of the most (if not the most) successful twitter clients, TweetDeck. The $25-30 Million on the table from UberMedia earlier this year was apparently out-bid by Twitter for between US$40-50 million.
Twitter could have gone down the path of developing an ‘official’ twitter client in-house, but has done the right thing and paid the developers for their hard work. This now presents an interesting situation in the mobile space. Twitter previously acquired Tweetie and turned it into the ‘official’ twitter mobile app. So what happens now to the mobile version of TweetDeck ? Will it become the new flavour of the day or continue to compete for market share.
One massive advantage of owning TweetDeck is that twitter can now push ads to one of an audience of millions who use Adobe-AIR built, multi-column desktop client. While twitter is still working on its business model, ads will certainly play a part at some point. Right now we have promoted tweets which TweetDeck actually supports (this could be an API requirement), but by owning the client outright, Twitter are free to experiment.
More @ TechCrunch
