ReadWriteWeb

Last week at the ReadWriteWeb 2WAY Summit, our COO Sean Ammirati spoke to Betaworks CEO John Borthwick. Betaworks has funded and incubated a number of companies in the real-time Web market, such as TweetDeck, Bit.ly and Chartbeat.

Twitter has been developing a lot of new core products recently that used to be filled through third-party applications. Yesterday, the company introduced a new feature to Twitter.com - automatic link shortening.

If you wanted to shorten a link within Twitter.com before, you had to use a link shortening service like Bit.ly or TinyURL and paste the link into the "New Tweet" field. Twitter will now truncate URLs that are longer than 13 characters and give them a t.co ID (Twitter's URL shortening handle) while keeping the original URL intact so you know where the link originated.

Leading social media client software provider Tweetdeck has been acquired by Twitter, it was confirmed by both companies today. I've got a lot of thoughts about the news, which I'll be posting as soon as I complete some interviews with various people in the industry, but one part of the story deserves its own mention.

I asked Twitter point blank this morning "Will Twitter remove Facebook from Tweetdeck?" My reply came from Jodi Olson, Corporate Communications at Twitter: "Short answer is, we'll continue to invest in the TweetDeck that you know and love." Ok then, that seems straightforward enough, while still maintaining that typical maddening feel of non-communication from one of the world's leading communication companies. You're still 58 characters short of 140 there, Jodi, but as I wrote back: I'm going to take that to mean that 3rd party networks are staying in.

Twitter desktop client TweetDeck holds "Hack Days" that are opportunities for their developers to break their normal routines and create a new project. TweetDeck held a Hack Day May 11 and their programmers were hard at work creating some innovative new designs that have the opportunity to make it into production.

Entries included "Quick Send Tweet" that allows you to email tweets to yourself for later browsing, a Gmail notification box and a cool Android hack called "Tweet-As-You-Go" that uses a smartphone camera to view a live background on the compose tweet screen. Check out the entries after the jump and vote for them on TweetDeck's blog.

TweetDeck, the leading third party Twitter client, has been acquired by Twitter - according to Techcrunch. As of writing, neither Twitter or TweetDeck have confirmed the deal. If it does go through, it will spell the end of TweetDeck's grand plan to become the central hub for social networks. In other words, the Holy Grail of the social Web. While it started out as just a third party Twitter client, for most of its nearly 3 year existence TweetDeck has been building itself up to be a "a new browser for the real-time Web."

Since it added Facebook support in March 2009, TweetDeck has aimed to be a central app from which people can interact with all of their social networks. That's a potentially massive commercial opportunity for a startup. Imagine being able to control your Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn and other social services using the one interface. That's precisely what TweetDeck does right now, only it's not quite fully functional yet and people haven't gotten used to the concept. Unfortunately, the acquisition by Twitter will put an end to TweetDeck's ambition and we'll have to wait for another startup to chase that Holy Grail. Here's how this all played out and our guess at what will happen next...

Last month, rumors hit the Web that TweetDeck, the multi-columned, much-preferred desktop client of hardcore users, had been acquired by Twitter. Today, TechCrunch is reporting that the deal has gone through, with Twitter snapping up the company for $40 to $50 million.

While we don't want to be melodramatic, we're afraid that this deal could be the beginning of the end and here's why.

Calling it a re-imagining à la Hollywood's recent Batman movies, TweetDeck has released a redesigned iPhone app. The new version takes "the essence of what made it so popular" (TweetDeck that is, not Batman) and ses that to rethink the app's design and functionality.

For those who use TweetDeck on your desktop computer, you'll probably agree that that means a focus on columns. The standard columns are still available: Mentions, DMs, Lists and so on. But now you can also have combined columns (adding your Home, Me, and Inbox columns so you can see updates from multiple Twitter accounts you might have). You can also customize the appearance of feeds in your columns.

Popular Twitter client TweetDeck, previously reported to have been acquired by Ubermedia, is now said to be in talks with Twitter for an acquisition that would nearly double its former $30 million price tag.

The Wall Street Journal reports today that Twitter is "in advanced talks" to buy the client for around $50 million, according to "people familiar with the matter."

TweetDeck's Web application, which made its Chrome Web Store debut back in December, has generally proved to be a worthy alternative to the TweetDeck AIR application for the desktop. However, up until today, the Web app only worked with Google's Chrome Web browser.  Now, says the company, TweetDeck is coming to all the major browsers, including Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer and Opera.

Is it the constraint of 140 characters per message that makes Twitter what it is? Or is Twitter now a broader, real-time messaging service that needn't be constrained by a character limitation?

The most prominent third party Twitter client, TweetDeck, recently introduced a "long post" feature called Deck.ly, which brings those questions to the fore. Deck.ly allows Twitter users to post messages longer than the traditional 140 character limit. In this post I'll argue that Twitter itself will probably soon follow and expand beyond 140 characters. Indeed, it will need to if it's to continue expanding into the mainstream.