Yesterday Twitter announced it has acquired Tweetie, the popular Twitter client for iPhone (and Mac desktops but the move seems to focus on the iPhone app).

Disclaimer: I love Tweetie; dispite it not being free (it will be free from now on), I liked it much better than the free alternatives.

For Twitter, this is a good move. It will finally give them an 'official' client for phones. They also announced a Blackberry app yesterday, and you can easily see that they needed one by looking at their 'Using twitter with your phone' page. It explains how to use Twitter using SMS, something that never really caught on as a main twitter use. With this move, Twitter fills a hole they had in their product offering. It is very similar to what happened in 2008, when they acquired Summize, which is now search.twitter.com.

Back then I predicted this could be their business model and this move perfectly fits within the strategy I then described.

When acquisitions like this happen, twitter is full of opinions. Here are 2 that stood out for me:

Now it's perfectly logical that Funkatron is emotional. He is the author of Spaz, another popular Twitter client. When looking at it more closely though, we notice that Spaz is not available for iPhone, and Tweetie is not available for most platforms Spaz supports (the only overlap is Mac desktops). Also, Twitter owning Tweetie has no effect on Spaz's Statement of Purpose. Still I can understand Funkatron's sentiment. I was in a similar position when Google released Google Calendar when I had just developed the first version of Epointment, but in the end that's life. Sometimes you gamble and loose. But Spaz hasn't lost yet. It has a massive amount of followers so there is no reason why it shouldn't continue to flourish.

Ramsey's argument is that this stiffles choice. Surely the fact that Twitter can heavily promote Tweetie as the default iPhone client will help boost Tweetie's popularity and will make it harder for other clients to market themselves, but it does not stiffle choice.

I've seen comparisons to Microsoft killing off Netscape. This was different because Microsoft bundled IE with every copy of Windows; Twitter has no way to bundle Tweetie other than promoting it on their site. As long as Twitter remains an open platform, opportunities to create your own clients will remain. There are numerous examples:

• Microsoft owns the official MSN client, yet there are tons of popular MSN clients out there.
• Philips invented the CD yet there are many CD player manufacturers. Philips is not even the most popular one.
• Google owns Google Apps AND the official iPhone client, yet there's a ton of iPhone application clients that users can choose from
• Slightly unrelated but very similar: Vimeo wasn't killed when Google purchased YouTube, nor was Facebook when Google acquired Orkut

It will be a different story if Twitter stops playing fair. If they close their platform, shut out other clients, THEN it will be an evil move. But as long as the platform remains open, competition will be slightly harder for Twitter clients, but the rules haven't changed and we're playing the same game.

Remember the Long Tail? Today's business is all about 'finding your niche'. Sure, Twitter just moved Tweetie to the left side of the tail, but there is a huge long tail of users and niches that people can still cater too. Spaz and other Twitter clients have unique properties that make users choose them as their Twitter clients. If they wouldn't have those, they would not have a chance against other Twitter clients no matter what big corporation owns them. In fact, I believe that this move by Twitter will lead to even more Twitter users as it becomes easier to start using Twitter on your phone. This means that the market increases, even for companies that build clients and other software on top of the Twitter platform.

Finally, this discussion is similar to Apple's OS4 announcement. By announcing their own gaming network and their own ad network, they struck a huge blow to existing networks such as OpenFeint and AdMob. These companies are now forced to compete with Apple by building a better product and differentiating their products. Will this kill them? Maybe, maybe not. In the end, it doesn't matter who owns what tools; the users determine what they will use and what products will survive.

And sometimes business is just like playing poker. If you're not willing to lose, you shouldn't play.

Back in the late nineties, when many websites still looked like this, the people at Sun had a vision that the web could be so much more than static HTML. They created the concept of Java Applets that could be placed on webpages to make them richer and do stuff that HTML just couldn't. Like adding animated menus and hideous buttons.

This was quite the cool thing to have at the time, but there were a few fundamental problems. One: it was horribly slow. Nobody really cared because at 28K8 modem speed on a 486, anything was slow, so the few extra seconds it took to load the Java stuff was accepted, at least for a while. But the second problem was that it was quite unstable. More often than not, it would crash your browser. (There's actually about a 1 in 4 chance that the above link still crashed your browser today, 10 years later; the significant improvement is that Firefox will have remembered what page it crashed on and will let you re-experience the crash upon restart. Twice the fun.)

So with most Java developers not getting beyond the 'L33T, I HAZ CREATED A BUTTON!!' stage and HTML, CSS and JavaScript gradually becoming rich enough to create hideous buttons without Java Applets, the technique more or less died. (Well, Java itself didn't; it firmly grasped on to the enterprise software market because the former button developers had kids to feed.)

We then had a few years of plain HTML/CSS/JavaScript happiness with the occasional Flash animation, when suddenly the big guys thought it was time to enrich the web again. Not with Java of course, which people still associated with fancy buttons and crashing browsers, but with new shiny technologies like Silverlight and Flex. (Sure, both Microsoft and Adobe are in favor of open standards as long as they can each have their own standard).

The concept is very much the same, both Flex and Silverlight allow you to create buttons! But this time, we use a Three Letter Acronym, because *THAT* was what Java failed, the lack of a proper Three Letter Acronym!

We call this modern variant of user interface richness: RIA, for Rich Internet Application (maybe it was supposed to stand for 'Rather Implemented an Applet' though). Like in the past, the idea is to do stuff in the browser that HTML won't let you.

Sun, who years ago created the RIA avant la lettre with their Java applets, must have watched this trend in amazement. And now that RIA's are in the early adopter stage and have enough momentum to become mainstream, it's time for them to give it another try. They are relaunching the applet idea with what they call 'JavaFX' (come on, that name just sounds like 'fancy button' all over again). Details on this can be read in this article on TechCrunch.

Interesting times are ahead. With Google Chrome possibly igniting the Third Browser War, we'll also see the RIA wars, where JavaFX, Silverlight and Flex will battle to become the dominant technology to create rich internet applications. One potential outcome: they all fail and the outcome is an improved, richer version of HTML and plain old JavaScript. Another potential outcome: they will all find their niche and we'll get incredibly cool apps. Back in the days of the Applet, the web was relatively immature. We weren't ready for real web applications. Maybe that is why Java Applets didn't survive the Button stage.

This time around however, more and more applications are webbased, so there's quite a big chance that this time, RIA technologies will catch on and outgrow their Button stages and give us some really compelling browser experience.

Time will tell. Let's look back at this in another 10 years or so.