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Twitter Acquires Tweetie, App Developers Hold Collective Breath

by Amar Toor on April 12, 2010 at 09:29 AM

In 2009, Twitter managed to rake in considerable amounts of cash. Now, in 2010, it seems like it's finally ready to start spending some of that paper on serious expansion. As the New York Times reports, Twitter has agreed to acquire start up company Atebits, which owns the popular Tweetie app for iPhones and Macs. Although the final price of the acquisition wasn't disclosed, Atebits founder Loren Brichter seems pretty happy with the deal, and with his new role as a Twitter insider. As he wrote on the Tweetie blog, "I'm happy to say that as of today Twitter is the proud owner of Tweetie – and I'm joining their mobile team and starting work on turning Tweetie.app into Twitter.app, for iPhone and iPad."

Many developers, though, don't share Brichter's enthusiasm. Whereas Twitter has traditionally focused on the development of its website, leaving mobile apps to third party developers, its decision to bring Tweetie under its wing may signal a new, more expansive market strategy for the social networking site -- and one that could leave many developers out of a job.

Twitter chief executive Evan Williams maintains that developers' concern simply stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of the platform-developer relationship. As he told the New York Times recently, "There's both a natural win-win relationship between a platform provider and third-party developers, and there's a natural tension." Venture capitalist investor and veteran Twitter board member Fred Wilson echoed Williams' sentiment in a recent blog post, saying that it made perfect business sense for Twitter to acquire many of the services currently offered by third-party developers. Wilson thus advised the developing community to focus their creative energies on other products and services, like business tools, analytics or games.

As it may be an ominous sign for the developer community, it shouldn't come as any real surprise that Twitter would eventually choose to make major moves toward consolidation. The company certainly has some extra cash to throw around, and if its execs think it's a good business decision, it's hard to blame them. [From: NYT and Geekosystem]

Tags: acquisition, atebits, business, developer, iphone, Mac, smartphone, socialnetworking, top, tweetie, twitter, web

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