Tweetdeck sale shows British Entrepreneurs can do it too
So Tweetdeck is reportedly selling its platform to Twitter for $50million. I think this is a really positive sign for both Twitter, and UK entrepreneurs in general, as too often it is the US Silicon Valley-based businesses that manage to secure all of the large backing.
We have some truly brilliant minds in this country and this proves it. Tweetdeck, is a brilliant platform which has been developed by people in this country. It is a great tool that allows heavy Twitter users like me to update more than 20 different Twitter accounts regularly.
As I have developed my own Twitter management application I know the challenges that this presents but Iain Dodsworth and his team have done a brilliant job with moving with the times and keeping this application fresh and current.
I have seen a lot of conversation asking how does Tweetdeck make its money well does it need a business model if you have millions of users and you have two parties fighting to buy you out?
I remember when the platform was first launched, and I like many, found it a little tricky to get used to but these days after years of development it has become the Twitter desktop client of choice and Twitter would be wise to buy the number one application.
However, Caroline McCarthy of CNET reports:
It’s true that Twitter has aggressively pursued an acquisition strategy in building up a suite of applications–buying Tweetie and turning it into Twitter for iPhone, or buying Summize and turning it into Twitter Search–and that it does not yet own or operate a desktop-based Twitter client. (UPDATE: Actually, it does, sort of. When Twitter acquired Tweetie, it also acquired Tweetie for Mac, which has been turned into Twitter for Mac. But it’s a desktop app for casual users who do more reading than tweeting, not the “power users” drawn to TweetDeck.) So it would, one could surmise, want to buy TweetDeck independently of any competition from UberMedia. It’s a sensible fit for Twitter to own the client of choice among its most dedicated (dare we say obsessed?) users, and these “advanced talks” may have been going on for far longer than we think.
So I would personally like to wish Iain and the Tweetdeck guys good luck with the sale. It’s good to see British Entrepreneurs and developers mixing it with those in the US. I hope we see much more of this over the next few years and I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw something similar for Peer Index in the next three years or so.