After months of speculation, Twitter has finally completed its acquisition of Tweetdeck, the UK-based desktop software for the micro-blogging site’s more sophisticated and prolific users.
Tweetdeck - which once described itself as competing with Twitter – found itself at the centre of a bidding war between Twitter and Uber Media, Bill Gross’ company, which has acquired several popular third-party Twitter clients. But Twitter won the day with a $40m deal in cash and shares.
The 15-strong Tweetdeck team will stay in London and are set to become the poster child for the ambitious young tech companies clustering around Shoreditch’s “Silicon Roundabout”.
Tweetdeck’s investors have lavished praise on the young, largely pre-revenue company and its founder, Iain Dodsworth.
“Iain built a product that resonated with power Twitter users,” said Sean Seton-Rogers of ProFounders, one of Tweetdeck’s backers. “Those power users are also the most valuable from an advertising perspective. Twitter recognised that Tweetdeck was providing a service to those users that they couldn’t. It was a close relationship between the two companies from the beginning. Also, Tweetdeck, by empowering the most active users, has helped Twitter to grow to where it is. I suppose it’s natural that the two companies came together.”
Saul Klein of The Accelerator Group, another backer, said in a blogpost that Tweetdeck was pitched as the “FT for the social web”.
“When we met Iain, he was a one man band, based in the tech mecca of Tunbridge Wells. But as a lone developer he had created some real magic. Tweetdeck was making signal out of Twitter’s noise with a simple but very powerful UX innovation – columns. This insight had already made Tweetdeck the leading desktop client for Twitter and its stayed there.”
I caught up with Mr Dodsworth last night for his views on the deal:
What will your role be now you are part of Twitter?
I am product manger for Tweetdeck, effectively doing exactly the same as we are now. We will get a lot more users using Tweetdeck – a lot of people will be pushed towards this from the platform. That is going to be pretty huge for us. Twitter is completely behind what I’ve been trying to do with Tweetedeck all the time – the power-user play. They see it as an audience of brands and influencers. There is a genuine understanding of the value of that audience.
Could Tweetdeck (which has always been free) help Twitter to monetise that userbase?
I think it’s possible. Our userbase is not one that is going to be particularly happy with having adverts unsophsitcatedly spat at them, which we ourselves have tried. But it is an audience that laps up new things.
We will be working on monetising Tweetdeck but as part of the [Twitter] platform rather than as a third party which does make sense. We will figure it out as one company now rather than as platform versus third party.
How do you plan to develop Tweetdeck’s features and functionality?
From a technology standpoint we are going to be part of this platform. We have spent three years not being part of the platform – that is a very significant thing. Before this, we sat down and came up with wonderful products and features which we couldn’t do because we didn’t have access to the user data or have access to the storage. In one move we will have access to all that. It will take time to become part of the platform, but even so we are in that mindset where we can say, ‘How could we do this service if we had access to the firehose or extended information about our userbase?’ We are Twitter now.
Is it still going to be called Tweetdeck?
I think so – there’s not a huge amount of reason to change the name. As a brand it has some recognition which is great. To me it sounds like a product that Twitter could have come up with themselves. It sounds Twittery which is quite cool. I’m not overtly worried about that one.
Who did you work with at Twitter to make this deal happen?
It got board-level approval. They had already made up their mind they wanted to buy us. They were very clear that they needed to own Tweetdeck the product and the users, and the team that goes with it, to keep running it and make it better and better.
Why has Tweetdeck lasted while other desktop clients have not?
There was some luck at the beginning – it came out at exactly the right time [in 2008] when there was nothing else similar and that was luck. Going on from that, the iterations we made were really good. We could have very easily made very poor iterations and it would have fallen apart. There was so much choice [our users] could have easily jumped ship to another platform.
What does this deal mean for Silicon Roundabout?
I think it shows that you can start a company and grow it to a reasonable number of people very cheaply and exit – and you don’t have to be in Silicon Valley.
We didn’t sell the company because we are on Silicon Roundabout but we made a lot of connections. It is very cool that a little London company can be sold for as much as it has been sold. We are not moving to the other side of the world, we are staying here in London.
