[Rumor] Twitter to Buy TweetDeck for $50 Million!

Twitter started off as a project that has become huge. It has received several millions dollars invested by companies because of its phenomenal growth. The growth was massive but it had a problem from its very beginning. The problem was simple, how does Twitter which is so open, unorganized and uncontrolled make revenues?

Twitter_TweetDeck

Investors probably pushed some buttons, which started revenues for Twitter with “Promoted Tweets”.

Twitter hurt its own Developer Ecosystem

  • A lot of features on Twitter were created and developed but 3rd party developers. A popular feature on desktop and browser apps was to arrange Twitter users into groups. Twitter brought about its own version of management by bringing in Twitter Lists.
  • Twitter also took the Retweet button idea from another 3rd party developer called TweetMeme which allows visitors on a webpage to tweet about it from the page itself.
  • It has with it’s own official Twitter clients for mobile platforms has hurt 3rd party mobile apps which were doing the same.

In all developments, Twitter was not the pioneer but a follower, but in all fairness to them, they had to make get into these things to streamline their service with better control over it.

Now it is shelling out almost $50 million to buy a 3rd party application called TweetDeck. TweetDeck as a lot of Twitter regulars might know, is one of the most popular Twitter App for Desktops and Mobile phones. Twitter might be doing this to thwart moves by UberMedia to buy TweetDeck.

If Twitter does spend the $50 Million on buying TweetDeck, it would be a the first time a 3rd party developer will make a big fortune instead of competing with a Twitter developed copy. 🙂

What are your views? Would TweetDeck be better of being bought by Twitter? Do drop in your comments.

Source: Business Insider

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2 Comments

vikas@niche bloggers April 20, 2011

You’ve written the title ‘RUMOR’ but you have not mentioned anything about the rumor looks like you are not sure that tweetdeck will be sold or not. 🙂 if you know then please reply.

Aditya Kane April 21, 2011

The rumor is based on the fact that none of the companies have accepted they are negotiating. But this is reported by Business Insider which is quite a reliable source. It has been credited at the end of the post as the source for this news.