With Tweetie Acquisition, Twitter Locks On Mobile

by admin April 10, 2010 at 10:12 pm

Twitter has acquired atebits, the company that makes popular Tweetie applications for the iPhone and Mac OS X. In so doing, the company is fortifying itself as a mobile communications service — that happens to have a web site you can also use.

Twitter has been radically open with the way it processes the small messages its users send, encouraging third-party developers to use that information to build applications that let people use the service more easily and in places and ways the company itself doesn’t have the time or inclincation or expertise to do on its own. It’s a classic crowdsourcing move.

Developers have taken that ball and run with it, with abandon. While it’s possible to use Twitter purely in an SMS context — sending texts from your phone that go into your timeline, or as direct messages to others — and to use your Twitter web page, there have been a plethora of desktop and smartphone applications that have added functionality and friendly graphical interfaces. And it is via these that Twitter has spread like wildfire.

Read more: wired.com