TweetDeck founder Iain Dodsworth announced the news this morning on the company's blog:
The past three years have been an epic journey, with many highs and lows, accompanied by the constant thrill of never really knowing what to expect next. We've grown from one team member and a single user, to a team of fifteen and a user-base of millions. The reason for this growth is simple - our unwavering focus on providing high-quality tools and services for the Twitter-centric power-user. This has always been our core audience - the most active, influential and valuable users of Twitter and social media in general. Quality over quantity.
It is precisely for this reason that Twitter has acquired TweetDeck. The mainstream Twitter user-base is well catered for by twitter.com and the official mobile clients. And by becoming part of the official platform, TweetDeck will now fill that role for brands, influencers, the highly active and anyone that just needs "more power".
Change may well be inevitable, but we remain the same team, staying in London, with the same focus and products, and now with the support and resources to allow us to grow and take on even bigger challenges.
Twitter echoed similar themes on its own blog post:
This acquisition is an important step forward for us. TweetDeck provides brands, publishers, marketers and others with a powerful platform to track all the real-time conversations they care about. In order to support this important constituency, we will continue to invest in the TweetDeck that users know and love.
TweetDeck is a great example of a third-party developer that designed tools for the incredibly important audience of Twitter power-users and, in turn, created value for the network as a whole.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed by either company, but media reports have pegged the price Twitter paid in the $40-million range.
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