We knew that it was happening, but now we have it from the source. Twitter has confirmed today in a blog post that it has acquired TweetDeck, though no price was mentioned.
This acquisition is an important step forward for us. TweetDeck provides brands, publishers, marketers and others with a powerful platform to track all the real-time conversations they care about. In order to support this important constituency, we will continue to invest in the TweetDeck that users know and love.
Some further insight is given on the TweetDeck Blog, which states that TweetDeck will move into the position for those of us who need a more powerful client than what is currently available in the stock clients.
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”.
Interestingly it appears that the TweetDeck team will stay in place, both physically and from a managerial standpoint. CEO Iain Dodsworth will be staying in London with the rest of the team, taking up operations from Twitter’s upcoming London office.
More to the point on TweetDeck being picked up as a service for the power user, we took the chance to ask Twitter whether it would be a premium (read that as paid) service. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a true answer:
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Given that it wasn’t addressed specifically, we can only assume that Twitter is still deciding what the ultimate goal of TweetDeck will be, and how it will be played out. However, given the monetization goals of Twitter as a company, it would not at all surprise me to see TweetDeck become the paid client option.
Interestingly, the same response was given (verbatim) when Twitter was asked whether support for other social networks would continue.
From us here at The Next Web, our congratulations go out to both teams. Twitter and TweetDeck have been a pleasure to work with in the past and we look forward to seeing where the acquisition leads for the future.
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