
Twitter To Buy TweetDeck For $40 Million – $50 Million - acrum
http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/02/twitter-to-buy-tweetdeck-for-40-million-50-million/
======
dotBen
Thoughts on whether Twitter will actually maintain Tweetdeck post-acquisition?

For me, I have a feeling they will mothball it for three reasons:

a) The aesthetic and visual approach of Tweetdeck doesn't fit in with the way
Twitter wants its product used

b) Twitter are looking to staff up a London office, it would make sense to use
Tweetdeck _(based in London)_ as that office (EDIT: the implication being that
said staff would work on Twitter related business, not Tweetdeck)

c) This was all about a tactical blocking of UberMedia, not a strategic
product acquisition.

Regardless of what happens to the 'main' Tweetdeck product, the ancillary
iPhone and Android apps must surely be slated to be shelved given they compete
directly with Twitters existing offering... I can only assume this is good
news for the other mobile apps out there, like TweetCaster for Android

~~~
teyc
I'm reminded of Alister Croll's article that "Twitter is a protocol, not a
site" [http://www.bitcurrent.com/twitters-not-a-site-its-a-
protocol...](http://www.bitcurrent.com/twitters-not-a-site-its-a-protocol/)

There is no reason why Tweetdeck couldn't co-exist with Twitter's main
clients. Twitter power users are the ones who tweet the most and innovate the
most. Think of RT, # tags, pictures. Having a bleeding edge product keeps the
power users happy without alienating the existing users by moving their cheese
all the time.

~~~
dotBen
Problem is, Twitter don't see twitter as a protocol.

~~~
nikcub
I bet that a lot of the internal discussion and hesitance within Twitter over
the past couple of years has been around this very topic.

It seems that the product guys won the argument over the platform guys.

The problem now is that a large part of the reason why the product was
successful is because of the platform and the dev ecosystem

------
timjahn
A company that doesn't make money buys another company that doesn't make
money. The Silicon Valley economy exists entirely on its own with no relation
to the "real world".

~~~
nikcub
Twitter had revenue of $50M last year, and is projected to run $150M this year
and $250M next[1]

In the past 12 months Twitter has built out an entire north american sales
force lead by former FIM exec Adam Bain, who is v good at what he does. So
those numbers are before any international expansion, and do not include API
licensing (via Gnip)

It is very disingenuous and flat out wrong to write Twitter off as having no
revenue. They have no profit, but the point of a company at their stage is not
to book profits, it is to spend as much money to grow as quickly as possible
(building that sales team alone isn't cheap - let alone infrastructure). If
they _were_ making money, the investors would sure as hell be asking why. This
is simple startup economics where you have a company and product in
hypergrowth.

Twitter is so ingrained in the mainstream conscious now. My non-tech family
members and friends kept mentioning it all weekend in context of the royal
wedding and the bin laden death. The cable news networks spent a lot of time
just showing their viewers what is on twitter

It is here to stay at least for a little while, so time to throw out the
2009-era skepticism and false criticisms

As an aside, Tweetdeck are also healthy revenue wise. Healthy enough to be an
18 person company that last raised a small round a year ago and that can
charge $50k per ad partner for placement[2]

[1] [http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-01-24/twitter-s-ad-
rev...](http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-01-24/twitter-s-ad-revenue-may-
triple-to-150-million-emarketer-says.html)

[2] [http://techcrunch.com/2009/06/01/want-your-service-
integrate...](http://techcrunch.com/2009/06/01/want-your-service-integrated-
with-tweetdeck-itll-cost-you-a-cool-50000/)

~~~
djb_hackernews
I wonder if you could flesh out your thoughts on Gnip and other licensed API
syndicators such as datasift/mediasift.

~~~
nikcub
Gnip has shifted a bit. When it started out the purpose was to solve 'the
friendfeed problem'[1] - which was that for each service friendfeed integrated
with, they had to write an entire module to implement a client of that
services API

The thinking was that Gnip would implement the client once, and then expose a
standard interface so that a dev could integrate with all of these services
using just a single API

The second part was that instead of polling, Gnip would push update data to
you using XMPP or callbacks.

I think they found that there isn't that large a market for apps, at that time
or this time anyway, that needed to integrate with a dozen or more services to
make paying Gnip worthwhile

The second part solved itself through either pubsubhubbub or API's
implementing their own callback.

Gnip downsized for a while, but saw a resurgence with the Twitter deal. It
makes sense for Twitter to offload serving the API, implementing track, etc.

I think datasift is a bit different. Actually a bit more advanced since they
support many more ways to slice and dice the data, analytics, and more. That
space is more like hootsuite and the similar services - you want to mine
social network data and extract key analytics. Gnip is more about making API
consumption for apps easier.

Gnip has 50+ services, Datasift about 6 or 7 - so you can see where they are
beginning to diverge.

When Gnip first launched, I spent a day with the team as part of covering the
launch for techcrunch. My own conclusion at the time was that Gnip was a stop-
gap measure between then and whenever the protocols such as PuSH would be
stable enough to see wide adoption. There was also the element of outsourcing
your API which didn't seem right - Mashery does something similar with
outsourcing dev community, API tokens etc. But Gnip have proven otherwise with
the twitter deal. (edit: for reasons why twitter would use them, see [4]

What could be interesting is Gnip has morphed into part of the old Gnip, with
aggregation and normalization, plus something akin to Cloudflare but for API's
- while datasift has become a datamining and analytics platform more for
internal business use.

The space that Datasift is in will be huge. With Gnip I am still a bit
indifferent only because I am implementing an app at the moment that talks to
a dozen or so different API's and I couldn't see how I would use it or why I
would pay for it, but the twitter firehose isn't one of hte API's (but twitter
auth is - and Gnip, from what I know, doesn't touch auth at all)

As an aside: and interesting point in history is that when Gnip launched
twitter totally rejected them, only later to give them access and then take it
a step further with a full commercial partnership[2][3]. that was back when
the twitter firehose was 5-6 tweets a second, it hit 5k a second yesterday

[1] [http://www.techcrunchit.com/2008/06/26/the-new-datastream-
ag...](http://www.techcrunchit.com/2008/06/26/the-new-datastream-aggregators-
friendfeed-and-standards/)

[2] [http://www.techcrunchit.com/2008/07/18/battle-over-
twitter-o...](http://www.techcrunchit.com/2008/07/18/battle-over-twitter-
opens-up-to-gnip/)

[3] [http://techcrunch.com/2008/07/18/twitter-plays-nice-xmpp-
fir...](http://techcrunch.com/2008/07/18/twitter-plays-nice-xmpp-firehose-
data-feed-to-gnip/)

[4] [http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2010/11/why-is-twitter-
part...](http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2010/11/why-is-twitter-partnering-
with-gnip.php)

------
pclark
TweetDeck had ~10% of Twitters user base as users, and they sold for a mere
$50M. This should speak volumes about "not being someones bitch."

~~~
jcampbell1
...or not being in a market where no one knows how to make money. The best
exits are for the companies that don't need to.

~~~
pclark
TweetDeck could make barrels of money if Twitter allowed them to run adverts.
(of some capacity)

~~~
brandnewlow
Tweetdeck could run adverts just fine, Twitter just didn't want them running
them in a sketchy in-stream manner, which I think is fair since their whole
app just sits on top of Twitter.

------
spatulon
This also means that Twitter could now have, if it chooses, an official
branded client that runs on Windows.

When they announced Twitter for Mac, they said:

 _"We acquired atebits with a focus on launching our own Twitter iPhone
application. Since then, we’ve been asked repeatedly for a new version of
Tweetie for Mac. We decided that the new version fits well into our goal of
ensuring that mainstream users will have the best possible experience on
popular platforms."_

Mobile platforms may be the future, and an OS X client allows them to show off
a bit and gain influential users, but the sheer size of the Windows user-base
is not to be sniffed at.

------
dylanrw
It's nuts to see the bird icon I made coupled with a product go this far. Go
Tweetdeck! :)

------
bbhacker
Could some share his opinion about other players in the Twitter ecosystem? I
am thinking about Seesmic that has acquried ping.fm, is bonding heavily with
Salesforce.com.

Are they still a relevant player in the field?

------
shazow
TweetDeck is also the only mainstream Twitter client I could find that
supports Identi.ca (and other federated Status.net derivatives).

I'm betting on s/is/was/ very soon.

~~~
joebadmo
Also Google Buzz (yes, I'm one of its four users). And even aside from that,
on Android it's easily my favorite Twitter client, and now my only hope is
that one or more of those alternatives or Dave Winer's latest project or
something else will save us from Twitter.

~~~
copper
FWIW, Buzz has a far better S/N ratio than twitter: I find people like Terence
Tao, in particular, to be particularly insightful when they're not hampered by
a 140 character limit.

------
kloncks
Ubermedia really got screwed on this one.

They went from having significant leverage and controlling a lot of tweeting
marketshare...to losing all that.

------
webbruce
Twitter is awesome and all but should focus on some sort of revenue to pay
back investors...

~~~
ggarron
I am still trying to guess how they are going to generate revenue, without
loosing "followers"

------
andypants
I really hope twitter decides to keep developing tweet deck...

------
ddemchuk
The day Twitter reports MAKING $50 million dollars rather than SPENDING $50
million dollars will cause celebration on the streets filled with champagne
and delight...until then, they're just a giant spam channel with a lot of VC

~~~
Joakal
"Twitter Inc. will probably more than triple its advertising revenue to $150
million this year as more companies use it to spread marketing messages,
according to Internet researcher EMarketer Inc."

[http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-01-24/twitter-s-ad-
rev...](http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-01-24/twitter-s-ad-revenue-may-
triple-to-150-million-emarketer-says.html)

~~~
ddemchuk
Gross revenue means nothing, profit is the only thing that matters.
Considering they have $360 million[1] in VC, and no mention of actual
profitability after 5 years, they're pretty high on the "Most Successful
Failures" list still.

1\. <http://www.crunchbase.com/company/twitter>

