Leading social media client software provider Tweetdeck has been acquired by Twitter, it was confirmed by both companies today. I’ve got a lot of thoughts about the news, which I’ll be posting as soon as I complete some interviews with various people in the industry, but one part of the story deserves its own mention.
I asked Twitter point blank this morning “Will Twitter remove Facebook from Tweetdeck?” My reply came from Jodi Olson, Corporate Communications at Twitter: “Short answer is, we’ll continue to invest in the TweetDeck that you know and love.” Ok then, that seems straightforward enough, while still maintaining that typical maddening feel of non-communication from one of the world’s leading communication companies. You’re still 58 characters short of 140 there, Jodi, but as I wrote back: I’m going to take that to mean that 3rd party networks are staying in.
Integration of other networks, especially Facebook, is important to many of Tweetdeck’s millions of users. Tweetdeck isn’t alone in offering that type of feature (competitors Seesmic and Hootsuite do that and more, for example) and the integration isn’t even terribly sophisticated or well done. Tweetdeck’s Foursquare integration, for example, is crude enough to be of questionable usefulness.
None the less, it’s good to hear some kind of statement from Twitter HQ voicing support for continued integration of those services. Of course it wasn’t the most strongly worded commitment, but I think it was widely assumed that Facebook integration in particular was likely to go out the window.
If Twitter’s really comfortable with integration of third party services into its official clients, though, then let’s get this party started. All kinds of interesting things could come of that. Perhaps Tweetdeck is where they will happen first.
