What Twitter's Purchase of TweetDeck Means for Marketers

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Now that Twitter has scooped up TweetDeck, a tool that helps people monitor conversations on the microblogging platform, what does the deal mean for marketers?

We posed this question to Hollis Thomases, president of WebAdvantage.net and author of "Twitter Marketing: An Hour a Day." Here's her assessment:

My first reaction was, 'There goes the neighborhood!' as in, now that Twitter's buying one of the more popular 3rd party apps, it will continue to compete against all the other independents and what's that going to mean to them? Twitter has already started to make it harder for independent developers with their restrictions and forthcoming API changes. What's the incentive (other than maybe to sell to Twitter one day) for a developer now to develop a new/cool/useful tool…which could detract from the very tools that have let us marketers advance our work?

Personally, after discovering HootSuite, I pretty much abandoned TweetDeck so the announcement didn't affect me personally...yet. If Twitter integrates TweetDeck (or some of its functionality) over to Twitter.com, it could provide value to users and marketers (e.g. a single point of multiple account management & Facebook updating); then again, Twitter.com is still one of the simplest and cleanest interfaces to use, which I think is particularly appealing to newcomers...and there are plenty of those coming aboard Twitter every day. Will there still be a simple interface that makes a newbie feel comfortable trying Twitter? I certainly hope so.

Twitter paid $40 million for TweetDeck, a 15-person shop based in London, according to the Financial Times. In 2008, Twitter bought Summize, a Twitter search engine, for about $15 million, according to the Business Insider.