Twitter Locks-On the Mobile Market through Tweetie Acquisition
Twitter recently purchased the company Atebits. Atebits is the company that makes the Tweetie applications that you see for both the iPhone and the Mac OS X. With the purchase, the company is working towards the fortification of their mobile communications services. Oh, they also happen to own a website.
Twitter has been amazingly open on the ways that they process the small messages that their users will send and they encourage the third party developers to build more applications that allow users to be able to use the service easier and to do so in the places that the company either doesn’t have the time or doesn’t have the inclination or the last option the expertise to do this on their own. Their move is classic crowd sourcing.
So what have the developers done? They took the ball from Twitter and have run with it. Although it’s possible to use the Twitter application a pure SMS context through the sending of texts from your mobile that will go into your timeline or through direct messages to other people and to your personal Twitter webpage the applications that have come out for both the desktop and the smartphones put in additional functionality along with friendly graphic interfaces. It is through these that Twitter has begun to spread like a wildfire with plenty of dry ground to eat.
The most successful of these without a doubt has been Tweetie, which is a $3 application through the iTunes store. The application is now going to be free. Twitter states that the acquisition actually works to plug a really big hole for the company. The users of the iPhone had felt that they could find an official application and for a long time they were really disappointed and a lot of them left very disappointed and often very frustrated. This isn’t the case any longer and the application is now going to be changed to Twitter for iPhone making it much easier for people to find it.
The web presence of Twitter was really quite incidental to both them as a business unit and as a service. When the put the search to their home page it was shrugged at and when there were others that cited the website visits to help quantify the popularity of the service and the reach of it there were those that laughed.
Twitter actually recognizes this as well as they state that mobile is where they are really at. Mobile has always been the focus thus the lead-in for the 140 character message limit.
Through the acquisition and development of programs like Tweetie there will be a lot less friction in the process and the more people sending their Tweets gets easier the more it’s going to be ingrained into our lives. The clients for the desktop and the whole web experience in total is just an accommodation to the process and works to increase the popularity over what the initial mobile plans were.
When it comes down to it there are going to be a lot of really amazing things that can happen both in the simplification of the process but also in allowing those people that use the product to do so anywhere they are at. Through the next generation of mobile clients this will be ever more possible. Time will tell where things are going and I for one couldn’t be more excited.
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