

Twitter acquires TweetDeck - daimyoyo
http://money.cnn.com/2011/05/23/technology/twitter_acquires_tweetdeck/index.htm

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Mazy
"CNN reported that Twitter acquired the business for more than $40 million in
a mix of cash and stock. If confirmed, the deal would end nearly 6 months of
rumors about advanced talks between the two companies."

The headline is misleading. CNN didn't confirm, they just reported on it.

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elithrar
I'm interested to see what Twitter actually does with the client. Do they EOL
it and force a migration to their own official Twitter client? If so, what
precedent does this set for other popular third-party client acquisition?

If not, where do they go? Tweetdeck, despite the name, does more than just
Twitter—though I'm sure the number of users accessing other networks through
it is low—but they're going to need to bring it in-line with their
monetisation strategy.

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MatthewPhillips
Precedent is that if you get big enough to become a threat, they will buy you
off.

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Lewisham
What "threat" was TweetDeck? All Twitter has to do is pull their API key, come
up with some story about third-party clients, and that is that. Twitter has
always been in the power position.

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MatthewPhillips
Then why didn't they?

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Lewisham
Multiple reasons:

1\. Goodwill with developers might be worth more than $40m in the long run. I
think the argument about users is fallacious: users will find something else
(because there aren't any rivals to Twitter itself) and quickly forget.
Developers don't forget as quickly.

2\. Maybe they actually liked the software and wanted to distribute it

3\. Maybe it was a talent acquisition

Anyone who has a business built on an API to another service is completely at
the whims of that service, and pretending that you form some form of "threat"
to the host is a dangerous move. I would hazard that the only company that has
ever grown large enough to strong arm the host was Zynga with Facebook (see
Zynga/Facebook Credits).

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mattwdelong
Here is a link to the original CNN article -
[http://money.cnn.com/2011/05/23/technology/twitter_acquires_...](http://money.cnn.com/2011/05/23/technology/twitter_acquires_tweetdeck/index.htm)

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yahelc
Motivations here are obvious (and were obvious 3 weeks ago when this was first
reported): It's a defensive acquisition to prevent UberMedia from taking over
the Twitter ecosystem. [http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/02/twitter-to-buy-
tweetdeck-fo...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/02/twitter-to-buy-tweetdeck-
for-40-million-50-million/)

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dotBen
Whether CNN has "confirmed it" or just reported it, CNN Money is certainly an
unusual source to break a startup story like this.

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hboon
They are mainstream now. I was playing the Wheel of Fortune iOS game a couple
of days ago. Both Twitter and Facebook were answers.

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uptown
Yeah ... Cause the arbitrar of what's mainstream is most definitely a dated
game-show turned mobile time-waster.

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jitbit
I guess they'll rip off the Facebook part and make it an "official" Twitter
client for Windows.

After 1 hour of working, the win-version of Tweetdeck eats more memory than
Visual Studio + SQL Server... Kinda bad for an "official" client that is
supposed to have high penetration among "casual" users, and work on Netbooks

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ankimal
What does this have to say about APIs and how much of your data you want to
open up? Is twitter _because_ of the eco-system it created through its open
API? The more pessimistic argument would be that the openness has come back to
bite it. How many more ghosts lurk in the closet?

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mindball
Ad network next?

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ujjvala
Advantage of doing it right...

