Twitter Buys TweetDeck - Not 3rd Party Anymore
posted Sunday May 29, 2011 by Scott Ertz
In March, Twitter made the announcement that they didn't want 3rd party interfaces anymore. While that was a strange move for a company whose users almost exclusively use 3rd party interfaces to use their service, it was not unexpected from a company who has no direction, like Twitter.
This week, in a strange combination of knowing how their service is used and spending money on things that make people use the service, Twitter purchased TweetDeck. For those who do not know, TweetDeck is a major player in the Twitter integration world, and one of the services Twitter was talking about ending through their API changes. The company describes the service this way,
TweetDeck is your personal real-time browser, connecting you with your contacts across Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Google Buzz and more.
For more on this story, hit the break.
TweetDeck, a London-based development team, will be folded into the official Twitter family, but will remain an independent development force. They will be allowed to continue working on their project as they have been from their existing offices. Of course, we know there will be tinkering from above, but that is always to be expected with a buyout.
What this really means for users is that if you are a brand, marketer or heavy user, you will still be able to use the most popular 3rd party service to interact with Twitter so you do not have to use the terrible clients that Twitter has made for themselves. Honestly, if you have a desire to use Twitter and hate the website as much as we do, you might want to check out TweetDeck anyway. It makes using Twitter almost bearable. Hopefully they will not lose that under the Twitter umbrella.
