Although there is plenty of drama to be had within the Twitter-verse, it is not often that you see this much drama over Twitter clients and company purchases like we are seeing now with Tweetdeck. According to TechCrunch.com, Twitter has acquired the popular iPhone and iPad client, Tweetdeck, and the $40-50 million transaction will be announced within the next few days. What happened to the deal between Bill Gross’ Ubermedia and Tweetdeck from back in February? It obviously fell through. Either way, Twitter is making a pretty strong move toward acquiring Tweetdeck and it’s not that hard to imagine why.
Mike Butcher over at TechCrunch explains a bit more. Currently, Twitter controls 100 percent of the ads that run through Twitter. That aside, there was also a study not that long ago that revealed that 0.05 percent of Twitter users drive about half of the overall traffic. Power-users like these use apps like EchoFon and Tweetdeck for their versatility and more robust features. Now, Ubermedia already owns EchoFon. If they were to acquire Tweetdeck, they would, in essence, be the ‘keepers’ of these elite users and be the source of about half of the tweets on the network.
Now we are beginning to see the problem that Jack Dorsey is facing right now. What if Bill Gross decided that they were going to use the ad-space on the apps that they own and take it away from Twitter? What if Ubermedia decides to take his user-base somewhere else? I’m sure there are questions like these (and more) going through Twitter’s mind right now. We’ll see as the story unfolds, but it looks like Jack and his team are in the lead.
