From the mouth of Michael Arrington unto us all: The TechCrunch founding editor reports that Twitter has bought turbocharged social media client TweetDeck for somewhere in the range of $40 to $50 million. This report comes after previous rumors that TweetDeck had been purchased by UberMedia, a developer that has previously produced apps for Twitter but had since grown increasingly antagonistic towards the social media service, with rumors that it was developing a rival client of its own.
This deal is defensive for Twitter, say all the sources we’ve spoken with over the last couple of months. They simply couldn’t allow UberMedia to have so much market share in this space. The company has acquired UberTwitter, EchoFon and a number of other Twitter-related startups. Adding TweetDeck to the UberMedia stable of products would give them too much leverage over Twitter, say our sources, and so Twitter made a strong defensive bid to disrupt the deal. Which succeeded nicely, apparently.
While TweetDeck’s install base is but a fraction of active Twitter users, on the whole TweetDeck users comprise many of the power users that are so crucial to Twitter as a source of content.
(TechCrunch via Techmeme)
