Tweetdeck is universally regarded as the best Twitter client. Unfortunately, Twitter just bought Tweetdeck for $40-50 million.
At least that’s the according to Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, who reports that it includes “both cash and Twitter stock.”
Now, you might be asking, “Why is this unfortunate?” Well, it’s only unfortunate if Twitter changes anything.
And it’s likely they will. But for the moment, Tweetdeck is fantastic because it allows users to run multiple accounts in the background, get alerted when they’re mentioned, set their own speed and time for seeing updates, sort who they’re following more neatly, and a slew of other things that are absolutely must-have if you use Twitter, in my opinion.
Twitter’s going to likely want to do a couple things. 1) Make money off Tweetdeck and 2) continue trying to get people to use Twitter products.
The good news, then, is that they own Tweetdeck. There are some issues with non-Twitter-owned products and their API access that becomes problematic some times, and so if Tweetdeck’s under the Twitter umbrella, things are a lot “safer” for users of the software.
But Twitter might have actually purchased the software in order to keep UberMedia, who Twitter hates, from getting Tweetdeck and then having everyone leave Twitter’s native apps (except for “Twitter for iPhone” which is actually good, although Twitter didn’t make it, sigh).
And that scares me — if Twitter’s just buying Tweetdeck to be on the defensive, do they really have the user experience in mind? Because it sounds more like they’ve got their own safety and greed in mind. That’s cool; we live in a capitalistic world. But I don’t want no one messing with my Tweetdeck.
The other issue — money — might be more problematic. There have been concerns that Twitter can’t justify its valuation because they can’t figure out any way to make money off of the product. Sure, billions (I think it’s billions; worst case it’s hundreds of millions or something) of people use Twitter. It’s a great, fun product for many different reasons.
And lots of people use Tweetdeck and prefer it as their client. But if Twitter is hell-bent on making that $50 million back, then there’s a good chance that Tweetdeck could become cluttered with ads. Imagine if you fired up Tweetdeck and there was a column that was entirely dedicated to “promoted trends,” like the new version of Twitter for iPhone has at the top.
Or if some interstitial ad popped up every ten minutes reminding you to use J.G. Wentworth – I want those advertisers to die a slow death, in case you didn’t know – to GET CAAAAASH NOW!
That’d be brutal. Sure it might result in some accidental clicks and make Twitter some money, but it would hog user’s computer memory, and it would cheapen the user’s ability to enjoy the experience.
Which is why if you’re a fan of Tweetdeck, you probably shouldn’t be celebrating Twitter’s decision to drop invest just quite yet.