• Tech Crunch, Tuesday, May 3, 2011 10:26 AM

Bringing a potential rival into the fold, Twitter has reportedly acquired TweetDeck for $40 million-$50 million. "This deal is defensive for Twitter, say all the sources we've spoken with over the last couple of months," writes TechCrunch. "They simply couldn't allow UberMedia [which has already acquired UberTwitter, EchoFon and a number of other Twitter-related startups] to have so much market share in this space."

Following top-level turnovers and broad strategy concerns, the microblogging platform was rumored to be eying the Twitter client for months. As the most-popular Twitter client not created by the company itself, TweetDeck is clearly an attractive target for both Twitter and UberMedia," writes VentureBeat. "Twitter has said that it wants to control the consumer experience around the service, and is encouraging external developers to focus on something other than a straightforward Twitter client. If Twitter has acquired TweetDeck, then it has further locked-up the consumer experience."

"Twitter wants more control over its platform," writes Digital Trends. "What better way to reach that goal than purchasing one of its top third-party clients?" "The deal would give Twitter an application that has won praise among sophisticated users for its slick interface and enhanced capabilities, while closing out a potential threat to Twitter's fast-growing service," writes Reuters -- which doesn't yet consider the acquisition a done deal.

Uunder the headline, "Why A TweekDeck Acquisition Could Stink For the Users," ReadWriteWeb suggests that Twitter may simply buy TweetDeck to shut it down. Another possibility, post-acquisition: Twitter will no long let TweetDeck users track their Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Myspace and Google Buzz accounts all on one dashboard.

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