Twitter Acquires Atebits, Maker of Tweetie | Hacker News Reader

Twitter Acquires Atebits, Maker of Tweetie

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121 pointsmarcusbooster43 comments

I guess Fred Wilson (Investor in Twitter) sort of Indicated this was going to happen...

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/04/the-twitter-platform.html

"Much of the early work on the Twitter Platform has been filling holes in the Twitter product. It is the kind of work General Computer was doing in Cambridge in the early 80s. Some of the most popular third party services on Twitter are like that. Mobile clients come to mind. Photo sharing services come to mind. URL shorteners come to mind. Search comes to mind. Twitter really should have had all of that when it launched or it should have built those services right into the Twitter experience.

When you talk to a new user, they want to know how to post a photo to Twitter, they want to know "what is this bit.ly thing?", they want to know how to get Twitter on their iPhone. Names like Summize, Twitpic, Tweetie make no sense to them. Of course, without Summize, Twitpic, and Tweetie we would not have the Twitter we have today. They and many other third party products and services filled out the holes in the Twitter product and made it work better."

what will this mean for other twitter app developers? twitter will be competing head on with them and presumably be able to implement new features quicker and easier.

It could go either way: because Twitter are now eating their own dogfood (i.e. the Twitter API) perhaps that API will improve. Alternately they may instead be tempted to start creating internal-only APIs.

Twitter has been eating their own dogfood with http://mobile.twitter.com

To put it succinctly: All of us are royally screwed.

I think there is enough room for everyone, I agree with what Marco tweeted about it:

"I think the health of the Twitter-client market, for apps that all do pretty much the same things, shows that they'll all be fine."

http://twitter.com/marcoarment/status/11914060592

Well, this is something like the famous saying "if you can't beat them, join them!" In this case "lost the edge, offer a big pile of cash and acquire them".

I think its a logic business move for Twitter. There is no point for them to spend the time and energy into an app that might take a reasonable part of the iPhone market. This way their investment immediatly gives them a huge part of the market.

Congratulations to the Tweetie developer! Official Twitter blog post here: http://blog.twitter.com/2010/04/twitter-for-iphone.html

Whoa. Probably a smart move by Twitter. Tweetie is one of the best and most polished apps on the iPhone.

Wondering what this means for Tweetie on OS X.

I recently made the switch to Nambu. It's not as pretty, but it's way more functional and useful to me, particularly with the combined view.

Agreed, Nambu is way better. Tweetie on OSX is pretty feature poor, all flash and little substance.

Disagree. Tweetie is better simply because it has separate windows for each tweet. That feature alone has kept me using it.

I'v been using Nimbu for some time but it was constantly crashing and I had to reset db several times so eventually I gave up and switched. how is it nowadays?

They've been releasing beta updates like crazy lately. The database update stuff happened a while ago, so if you just start from scratch it should be more stable.

There's a new twitter petition asking for it to be open sourced. http://act.ly/1w1

Loren is hard at work on it: http://is.gd/bmGoR. A beta is due to Macheist nano bundle purchasers.

Any idea when Tweetie will be made free?

FTA: "Twitter will offer it for free and rename it Twitter for iPhone."

So you are planning to wait to download Tweetie until it becomes free? To save $2.99?

To be honest I don't see what is wrong with saving $2.99. In fact I think it would be silly to go spend $2.99 on Tweetie when you know it is going to be free soon.

The developer probably doesn't need $2.99 from you but I don't mind giving somebody a small amount for a good piece for software.

I upvoted you because you shouldn't get downvotes just because you someone disagrees with a comment. Rather downvotes should only be used if a comment is irrelevant or trollish.

I downvoted you because meta-discussion of when and how downvotes should be used is irrelevant and boring.

It seems a shame to be losing the name Tweetie; I think Twitter should keep it - an established brand and a clever name, it's part of what their buying.

feel this exact way. Tweetie is very close to twitter and I feel that they could continue the brand without diluting the Twitter brand itself.

If I were a betting man, I'd be looking to Twitpic next.

Except that during a March 12, 2009 meeting, they discussed it and decided not to buy it, according to the Twitter notes leaked to Techcrunch.

http://techcrunch.com/2009/07/16/twitters-internal-strategy-...

I always felt a little bad for the Twitpic guy for that.

Also, that conversation from the notes spelled out pretty clearly that Twitter would eventually start pulling things like this.

Given that Twitpic apparently has multi-million annual revenue, I won't cry for them too long. ;-)

http://www.businessinsider.com/twitpic-is-doing-15-to-2-mill...

My guess is that's going to pretty expensive to buy a company with that much profit already and he's already turned down a $10m offer.

The move to buy Tweetie surely ratcheted up the pressure for the likes of Twitpic to sell. As the uncertainty begins to spread in the minds of these developers, the price will likely drop, and make a sale more palatable to Twitter.

If Twitpic was well implemented I could see it but it has no design and little innovation.

Why would they do that though? They could do a better job by building it into the site itself, and it would probably work out to be cheaper for such a simple feature.

True. The benefit of buying is eliminating one of the big pic players, and thereby disrupting the other twitter client apps. You also get an inventory of pics and a site where you could promote your new twitter properties.

“I’m [...] starting work on turning Tweetie.app into Twitter.app”. I bet there are a lot of unhappy Twitter iPhone/iPad client developers today.

congrats to Loren! i love his app. a true craftsman.

Congratulations! Well deserved.

And so it begins.

Twitter + Tweetie = Tweetrouble

Maybe Tweetrubble.

Pile of gold, eh? I guess this is why Tweetie for the Mac is still so extremely minimal. The developer got lazy because of his pile of gold. Bye bye motivation. Money makes people lazy.

Wh... what? Minimal applications aren't a result of laziness, they're designed that way. One of the many reasons why, IMO, Tweetie is the best Twitter client for OS X.

I do believe this quote came from Leonardo da Vinci:

"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication"

I don't recall him being lazy.

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