Attempting to Make Sense of the TweetDeck Deal

I’ve been thinking about the TweetDeck deal ever since it happened a couple weeks ago. The question on my mind is “Why would Twitter spend the money on this?”

The above article says it’s a defensive move: “They simply couldn’t allow UberMedia to have so much market share in this space.” I don’t see how that would be such a problem for Twitter, though. Yes, it’s theoretically plausible that they could use the weight of their userbase to try and steer Twitter in directions they don’t intend to go, but how far could they plausibly go? This is a situation where TweetDeck and UberMedia and all of the Twitter client makers are completely dependent on Twitter’s goodwill to survive. If Twitter changes the API and leaves no backwards compatibility, then that’s just tough cookies for everyone else.

Another theory I heard somewhere was that if UberMedia had bought TweetDeck, they would go create a competing social network. Twitter has nothing to worry about there - unlike social networks that have died in the past, Twitter has both a large, self-sustaining user base and a superior user experience. UberMedia could create at best a small fraction of the former, and would probably completely fail at the latter unless Twitter went far beyond dickbar-ing its users and destroyed its user-friendliness. Otherwise, Twitter is entrenched and they know it.

So what, then, makes TweetDeck worth 40-50 million dollars? Here are three possibilities.

Twitter Pro

TweetDeck is a client for people who need more power than the official Twitter clients provide (or, on Android, simply need a good client). Let’s introduce a new theory: what if Twitter decided to make a “Twitter Pro” application? It would be an application for people who depended on Twitter and needed every feature in the book - marketers and PR guys, for example. It would be so useful to many people, in fact, that they might be able to monetize it and sell the application. The biggest problem with that plan is that this application called TweetDeck exists, and offers every reasonable feature they can. Twitter would have to directly compete with them, and by gobbling up TweetDeck they can eliminate that problem.

I have other problems with this theory too: Twitter hasn’t shown much willingness to charge money for anything, TweetDeck (as an Adobe AIR application) isn’t quite up to Twitter’s high user experience standards, and eliminating TweetDeck and replacing it with a new application wouldn’t necessarily bring in all of TweetDeck’s user base to Twitter - certainly not if they’re charging for it.

Seizing Control

One more possibility would be that Twitter could be bringing in all the Twitter applications that to Twitter are worth keeping around, and then turning off the API to gain total control of the Twitter ecosystem. They are currently discouraging new applications, and going a step further certainly seems like a possibility. The previous theory and this one aren’t mutually exclusive - it’s possible that both are true.

If this is the case, however, Twitter could probably have clinched a better deal if TweetDeck knew it was doomed if it didn’t sell. Unless they told them in private that this would happen, it seems unlikely that they would have given up that much cash when they knew they could get away with less.

The Microsoft Approach

Finally, there’s the infamous Steve Ballmer theory: they’re buying stuff for the hell of it. This one’s pretty self-explanatory.

So, which could it be? I suppose all of them are possible, but not a single one sounds likely. Probably in a few months we’ll see for sure, though.