Twitter welcomes TweetDeck to the flock: http://t.co/xvRdD2c—
Matt Graves (@mgrooves) May 25, 2011
Boom. After about a thousand blog posts, Twitter has officially announced that it has bought TweetDeck.
We first reported that the total price of the sale was around $40 million, CNN’s Laurie Segall later confirmed this, adding additional information.
Twitter emphasized in their blog post that the acquisition was about the segment of Twitter users who were heavily active:
TweetDeck is a great example of a third-party developer that designed tools for the incredibly important audience of Twitter power-users and, in turn, created value for the network as a whole. As Iain’s journey suggests, there is significant opportunity for developers who deliver insights that foster a more engaged Twitter user base.
Meanwhile, TweetDeck says:
The mainstream Twitter user-base is well catered for by twitter.com and the official mobile clients. And by becoming part of the official platform, TweetDeck will now fill that role for brands, influencers, the highly active and anyone that just needs “more power”.
In other word, no, they won’t be shutting it down.
At the same time, TweetDeck CEO Iain Dodsworth says that “change may well be inevitable”. But the team will remain intact and in London.
Twitter also tells us that they have no plans to rename TweetDeck. You may recall that Twitter bought Tweetie last year and renamed it Twitter for iPhone (and later, Twitter for Mac).
This ends the drama that has surrounded the TweetDeck situation. In February, we reported that UberMedia was buying TweetDeck — and they were… until Twitter stepped in. Realizing that they could not lose such a large percentage of their userbase (13 percent of tweets are sent from TweetDeck) to a company that is competing with them to try to monetize tweets, Twitter had to get this deal done.
And that need may have pushed the price up some $20 million — very nice for TweetDeck.
Created in 2006, Twitter is a global real-time communications platform with 400 million monthly visitors to twitter.com, more than 200 million monthly active users around the world. We see a billion tweets every 2.5 days on every conceivable topic. World leaders, major athletes, star performers, news organizations and entertainment outlets are among the millions of active Twitter accounts through which users can truly get the pulse of the planet.
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