And on the acquisition front…
The short version is that Twitter wants to buy TweetDeck for $50 million according to the Wall Street Journal.
The medium version is that Twitter wants to buy TweetDeck as a defensive move against a company that currently accounts for 20% of all tweets (hint: the 20% is not from Twitter.com or their mobile app).
The longer version is that TweetDeck is the most used third party client on Twitter and the $50M acquisition is $20M higher than UberMedia bought TweetDeck for just this February. Shortly after the acquisition, one of UberMedia’s companies, Twidroyd was banned from Twitter for API violations (some say it is connected to the acquisitions, others claim it is not). If that isn’t tense, then UberMedia currently developing a Twitter competitor to allow for over 140 characters (in case they’re banned from Twitter again, they say) is tense, not to mention Twitter has $339 million dollars more than UberMedia.
Why we don’t care
This drama isn’t even Tupac/Biggie style with some interesting east coast /west coast rivalry, this is infighting in the California tech scene, plain and simple. Twitter has made little progress with their $361 million and barely have a stable platform or updated UI (don’t get us started), so it makes sense that they improve their offering by buying TweetDeck (since they can’t make a quality product of their own to save their lives), but they should have done so a long time ago. Since they have waited until now, it appears like a petty defensive move and honestly, a really boring move that we could care less about. Even if they did buy it, we sincerely doubt any changes would be made given Twitter’s track record, so it’s pretty much a non starter to us.
MH for Movoto
April 21, 2011 at 4:09 pm
I'm with you. There is soooo much infighting with Bay Area start-ups, and it's a total bore. I strongly doubt that Twitter will destroy or even dramatically change TweetDeck – and I use CoTweet anyway so meh.