"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.
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.
To my untrained eyes, it looks like they're trying to consolidate the Twitter eco-system, going by their recent statements about third-party clients. I would expect TweetDeck to either live on as something like "Twitter Pro", or be EOL'd and the team rolled into Twitter (or even layoffs).
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.
It would be a very unpopular move, if nothing else.
I don't know if TweetDeck has this much loyalty, but some companies in Twitter's position see 3rd party developers who grow large as a threat - members can grow to identify more with that developer than the underlying service.
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).
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
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?
The headline is misleading. CNN didn't confirm, they just reported on it.