Twitter acquires TweetDeck
money.cnn.com
money.cnn.com
The headline is misleading. CNN didn't confirm, they just reported on it.
If not, where do they go? Tweetdeck, despite the name, does more than just Twitter—though I'm sure the number of users accessing other networks through it is low—but they're going to need to bring it in-line with their monetisation strategy.
I don't know if TweetDeck has this much loyalty, but some companies in Twitter's position see 3rd party developers who grow large as a threat - members can grow to identify more with that developer than the underlying service.
1. Goodwill with developers might be worth more than $40m in the long run. I think the argument about users is fallacious: users will find something else (because there aren't any rivals to Twitter itself) and quickly forget. Developers don't forget as quickly.
2. Maybe they actually liked the software and wanted to distribute it
3. Maybe it was a talent acquisition
Anyone who has a business built on an API to another service is completely at the whims of that service, and pretending that you form some form of "threat" to the host is a dangerous move. I would hazard that the only company that has ever grown large enough to strong arm the host was Zynga with Facebook (see Zynga/Facebook Credits).
After 1 hour of working, the win-version of Tweetdeck eats more memory than Visual Studio + SQL Server... Kinda bad for an "official" client that is supposed to have high penetration among "casual" users, and work on Netbooks