By: Arthur Cooper
Submitted: 2011-04-22 16:49:46 | Word Count: 664
And the war continues…If you’ve been keeping up with this blog lately (as you should) you may have recently come across an article detailing the likely battle that will occur between UberMedia and Twitter as UberMedia threatens to create a Twitter competitor.
UberMedia whipped out the big guns about a week ago letting Twitter know that they will no longer be bullied and they have every intention of taking action and starting a micro-blogging platform all its own if Twitter doesn’t stop being such a thorn in UberMedia’s side.
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For those unfamiliar with the history, UberMedia was founded a few months back by Idealab and owns UberSocial, Twidroyd, Echofon and UberCurrentâ€"these are all Twitter sending platforms that are responsible for more than 11% of all tweets sent. To make a long story short, Twitter really doesn’t care much for these platforms and recently banned them from all Twitter access citing policy violations, trademark infringement, and changing the content of users’ tweets in order to make money. Twitter later reinstated access to these platforms but the relationship has remained less than friendly.
Since then, UberMedia has threatened to leave Twitter and compete with the social network, while also threatening to take already established UberMedia platforms UberSocial, Echofon and Twidroyd with it. Oh but, waitâ€"that’s not it. UberMedia didn’t only threaten to take what belonged to them; they also wanted to bring TweetDeck along on the venture. This is likely the part that had Twitter shook because boy, did they react.
It appears that as of very recently Twitter has put a bid in to acquire TweetDeck themselves. This war just got a bit more interesting. I admit, I was a little afraid for Twitter upon discovering the potential tricks that UberMedia had up its sleeve. Never did I expect Twitter to respond like this. In fact, I expected quite the contraryâ€"I expected Twitter to hear the threats made my UberMedia, cower then comply. I have never been more wrong…or impressed.
Yesterday the Wall Street Journal published a story claiming that Twitter is in talks to acquire TweetDeck (which is currently the third most popular client on Twitter’s platform) for nearly $50 million. This is an obvious counter to the $30 million that UberMedia CEO Bill Gross paid to acquire TweetDeck back in February but the deal reportedly never closed or simply fell apart. To this I sayâ€"Yikes! Either Bill Gross forgot the financial resources that Twitter has access to or maybe he didn’t think they’d take this route to seize TweetDeck from under him but either way I’m thinking he wasn’t prepared for this one.
Who knows if Twitter ever really wanted TweetDeck but it’s certainly clear that they don’t want UberMedia to have it. Twitter is simply not willing to risk allowing UberMedia to have that much leverage over the Twitter platform.
If this were a game of chess, UberMedia has undoubtedly been checkedâ€"one false move and they could lose it all. So what will it be, UberMedia? You’re up next.
