London based startup TweetDeck has been acquired by Twitter, for $40 million in cash and stocks, according to the Financial Times.
What was first cited as “advanced talk” between the two businesses has been happening for over a month. Apparently, Twitter beat rival UberMedia in a bidding war for the application development company.
TweetDeck launched three years ago and maintains a small team of 15 members that supports a userbase of over 20 million.
Sharing their perspective on the acquisition, TweetDeck blogged about the direction the team might take:
“The mainstream Twitter user-base is well catered for by twitter.com and the official mobile clients. And by becoming part of the official platform, TweetDeck will now fill that role for brands, influencers, the highly active and anyone that just needs 'more power'.”
It's no secret that Twitter.com has many problems and limitations. The official Twitter mobile apps are slower than others and power users are not able to manage multiple profiles or collaborate within one profile with any Twitter application.
Furthermore, Twitter is in unchartered waters for advertising, brands, and collaborative campaigns, whereas Tweetdeck, Hootsuite, CoTweet, and others have quickly made a mark. This year, Twitter made it very clear that they want to have more quality control within their eco-system of apps and create a more unified experience.
TweetDeck users fear, and rightly so, that the feature to connect with other social networks maybe removed after the deal goes through. Many are uncertain as to how Twitter will utilize TweetDeck, but an obvious move might be to deploy the desktop and mobile application as a 'trade up' from the official Twitter.com interface and mobile application. This would be similar to Google's strategy of acquiring companies for their talent rather than their product alone.
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