The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Twitter is “in advanced talks” to buy UK-based TweetDeck for $50 million. Normally this would have merely raised an eyebrow from me, but I actually did a double take because wasn’t TweetDeck owned by Pasadena-based UberMedia? Twitter and UberMedia don’t exactly have the chummiest relationship with each other especially after their spat in February that resulted in Twitter unilaterally banning all of UberMedia’s clients from Twitter.
Well, it turns out that UberMedia’s reported acquisition of TweetDeck back in February for $30 million never actually went through. Why?
According to Peter Kafka:
Last week, a person familiar with TweetDeck told me the deal still hadn’t closed because there were “valuation issues.” That explanation doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. Or more precisely, it sounds more like a polite way of saying “something came up that moved this thing from ‘almost done’ to ‘in limbo.’”
Hmmm, I wonder what happened there? Kafka goes on to theorize that maybe UberMedia just didn’t have a use for TweetDeck in its business strategy. Or that maybe TweetDeck investors got cold feet because they thought $30 million wasn’t a good valuation for the company.
Either way, it’s clear that UberMedia deal is not going to go through anytime soon. If you’re TweetDeck and you want to be acquired, why not by the “official” service that your client is based on? You get more stability from the stock exchange and you’re getting more valuation to boot. If they were interested in staying on board to develop their product, it would also guarantee that they would get full access to Twitter API’s and new features before other client competitors. Twitter gets a direct channel to many of their “power users” who often cite TweetDeck as their Twitter client of choice.
Come to think of it, as a TweetDeck user myself, I hope this deal goes through. “DickBar” aside, I’d like my preferred client to be “officially supported” by Twitter. I want better search support, dammit!
If we’ve learned anything about deals involving TweetDeck, though, it’s to wait until everything is signed and dated before talking about the consequences. Who knows, maybe the next suitor for TweetDeck will be Charlie Sheen.
