Finally, some confirmation. Twitter’s purchase of Tweetdeck has been in the works for a number of weeks now, with rumours flying about since early May. Originally discussed in February, reports indicated then that the popular Twitter application would be acquired by Bill Gross’ UberMedia for somewhere between $25 and $30 million. Twitter, apparently, bit back with a counter offer, reported by CNN and CNET at $40- and it’s been duly accepted.
The deal appeared to be as good as complete for quite some time, but hadn’t been reported or numbers confirmed. Twitter, apparently, weren’t comfortable with UberMedia taking another lump of its market share; with Twitter-related startups seemingly all ending up in the hands of companies like UberMedia and EchoFon. Twitter didn’t want UberMedia to have the massive leverage over it that it would have done, so buying TweetDeck was almost a necessity as far as they were concerned.
While TweetDeck appears to go against the ethos of Twitter itself, it is commonly used, often regarded as essential by businesses looking to hawk their wares to the self-aware masses residing across the social network. With an operating user base of around 200 million and 65 million tweets being recorded every day, Twitter is often referred to as the SMS of the Internet. While obviously 200 million people aren’t using it as such, it is highly interesting to note the exponential growth seen across the service. If an offshoot start-up only of value due to Twitter is worth $40 million, then the future can only be bright for the service, no matter how the acquisition of TweetDeck is presented.
