Twitter Acquires Tweetie for iPhone and Mac

Frank Gruber April 9, 2010 Tweet

According to a report in the NYTimes, Twitter has acquired Tweetie the popular iPhone and Mac application created by Atebits. Tweetie is by far my favorite Twitter application for the iPhone so it is no surprise that Twitter would rather acquire it than reinvent the wheel. Atebits is made up of just one employee, founder Loren Brichter, a software developer who was formerly with Apple’s iPhone development team. Tweetie for iPhone is going to be renamed Twitter for iPhone and will be reduced from $2.99 to a free application. Atebits also offers a Mac desktop version of Tweetie so it will be interesting to see how Twitter positions it.

Aside from this acquisition, it has been an interesting week as Twitter investor Fred Wilson, commented on Twitter and even tweeted about how 3rd party application developers need to focus more on building applications that are innovating on top of the platform rather than just plugging feature holes in the current Twitter offering. This statement caused a bit of buzz as Twitter grew to prominence due to it’s open APIs and 3rd party developer usage. With Chirp, the first ever Twitter developer conference coming up next week, Twitter is most likely positioning itself to make additional announcements and features so we’ll stay tuned.