Twitter buy TweetDeck

Popular third-party Twitter client TweetDeck has been bought up by Twitter themselves for a reported sum of between $50 million and $40 million.

Billed as a defensive move by some analysts, both cash and stock have exchanged hands between the two firms. UberMedia have also been recently linked to a deal with TweetDeck, with a 30 day exclusivity period for negotiations offered to the company who have already took control of the Echofon client. It seems Twitter have made the purchase to stop UberMedia from increasing their growing monopoly in the third-party client scene.

A UK start-up, TweetDeck launched in 2008. Linking in other social networks including Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and Foursquare, the platform is available as both a desktop and mobile application across multiple operating systems.