Michael Arrington, from TechCrunch, is reporting that Twitter has finally acquired TweetDeck. We wrote about the tug-of-war between Twitter & Ubermedia to acquire the UK based Twitter client but it finally looks like we have a winner!
Arrington is reporting a sale price of between $40 million to $50 million which also includes Twitter stock. It is expected that the acquisition will be officially announced in the next few days.
In February, Ubermedia made an attempt to acquire TweetDeck in order to add to their range of existing Twitter clients such as Echofon and UberSocial (formally UberTwitter). If Ubermedia were successful in their acquisition they would have greatly strengthened their position in the Twitter client market.
Twitter’s acquisition of TweetDeck is said to be mostly a defensive one in order to loosen Ubermedia’s grip on the Twittersphere.
It’s hard to know what Twitter will do with TweetDeck. Twitter previously purchased Tweetie and they eventually rebranded and relaunched the app to create Twitter.app – the only official Twitter app for desktop and mobile.
Will Twitter keep TweetDeck alive or will they choose to kill it off? Hopefully they will continue to develop the app as it’s clearly a very popular client with users. TweetDeck recently launched version 2.0 of their iPhone app and is planning further releases for other devices in the near future.
