Twitter may Buy TweetDeck for $50 Million

Back in February, there were some rumors that UberMedia might acquire TweetDeck, the popular Twitter client for desktop, iPhone, Android and Google Chrome.

\It looks like that acquisition bid failed and put TweetDeck up on the market again. However, they might not stay there for longer though as WSJ is reporting that Twitter is in advanced talks to purchase TweetDeck for around $50 million.

In the recent past, TweetDeck had purchased Tweetie for iPhone to expand their presence on the iPhone and have also released apps for iPad, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone 7.

The acquisition of TweetDeck might give Twitter an advantage in the Windows segment as it is the only platform that they don’t have a dedicated app for. Twitter creates and distributes it’s own Mac app.

Twitter has been receiving a lot of flak recently for it’s recent changes in their API ToS, where it basically asked new developers to stop developing apps for Twitter. This acquisition move might be a part of their recent change in mentality. Acquiring TweetDeck would give them a huge chunk of Windows users which TweetDeck has. It would also make them the largest app for Windows, effectively giving them an advantage over other Windows based Twitter client.

It will be interesting to see how this develops and whether it affects other Twitter app developers or not. Another important thing is that TweetDeck is also working on a web interface which will rival Twitter’s own web interface, so will Twitter kill it once they acquire TweetDeck? Only time will tell.

If you are a developer take this news with a pinch of salt, after all building a business around Twitter was probably not the wisest decision. I have learnt this the hard way and chronicled my experience in the post; Building A Business Around Someone Else’s Could Mean Disaster, do read it.

About TweetDeck

TweetDeck is a multi-purpose client which allows users to track their Twitter timeline, replies and direct messages along with providing a powerful interface to track brands and websites, and also follow Twitter trends and searches. Along with Twitter, TweetDeck also supports pulling feeds from other popular services such as Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn.

In recent months, TweetDeck has launched a Chrome App which allowed users to access TweetDeck from within Google Chrome and also a new web interface for TweetDeck aimed at users of modern browsers.

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