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Twitter scoops up TweetDeck: The rumor mill grinds again

The buzz about Twitter acquiring TweetDeck started flying again. No deal has been signed yet but everyone is waiting to see what happens next.
Written by Robin Harris, Contributor

The rumors of inevitability finally moving into the realm of reality, are well, still rumors. CNN did a great job of "getting all TMZ" on us with the headline Twitter acquires TweetDeck to pull in some page views but the deal has not yet been inked. Back in April the Wall Street Journal started buzzing about the talks between Twitter and TweetDeck but nothing ever materialized.

TweetDeck, has been one of the most popular, if not THE most popular, third-party Twitter clients to be adopted and used by the masses. I've been using it for personal Twitter activity and hashtag monitoring on my desktop for a couple of years now and love it.

Twitter plays an interesting role in social media. They don't have the best third-party app for their own users (hence the TweetDeck acquisition possibility) and they don't have the best stats/activity tool available to make sense of their own data for the rest of us to use for business or otherwise. However, they house billions and billions of conversational patterns from all over the world. While I don't think they'll ever eclipse Google when it comes to the importance and value of data housed - 140 character conversations vs. search queries - regardless if you like sites like Tumblr or Posterous better, Twitter is the king of the microblog universe.

After LinkedIn's IPO and the rumored Zynga IPO being kicked around, will Twitter continue on a strategic acquisition warpath with an actual acquisition of TweetDeck, or a monitoring/measurement solution, and maybe some other tools to eventually set the stage for a big IPO opportunity?

[ UPDATE: It looks like it's official now. Breaking news is very breaking in this day and age. Here's a link explaining what the acquisition means to you - http://bit.ly/kEOGOW ]

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