Twitter just announced that they’ve acquired Atebits, maker of one of the most popular iPhone Twitter clients, Tweetie. It’s nice to see Twitter finally provide an officially sanctioned client, something they’ve held off on doing since their launch in 2006.

What it means for users

The app will be offered for free – a nice change from the current $2.99 in the iTunes App Store. Tweetie will be rebranded to “Twitter for iPhone”, and will provide a much better experience to many users who might not otherwise pay the price. An iPad app is also on the way, which’ll be a nice alternative to my current choice, Twitterific.

However, no mention was made about Tweetie for Mac. I find it hard to believe that such great software would be thrown aside, especially since Loren Brichter will be continuing to work on the project. Update: It’s been confirmed that it is indeed on the way.

What it means for other apps

The future of unauthorized paid Twitter apps will be shaky, as Twitter for iPhone’s robustness, free pricetag, and existing mindshare will likely diminish other sales. There’s still a need for more involved, Tweetdeck-like apps, but a noticeable dent will be made nonetheless.

What it means for Twitter

I’d like to think that an official app would equate to a larger userbase, but I don’t see much difference in how potential downloaders will perceive “Twitter for iPhone” versus every other imaginable app containing the word “Twitter”.

More realistically, existing users who’ve dabbled only in the web interface will become more open to using a client. No longer will the use of a Twitter app be for power users and geeks; this is a significant milestone in the road to mainstream adoption.

What’s awesome about Twitter is that most of their keystone elements (retweets, hashtags, clients, etc.) have first been implemented by users, gained momentum, and then been officially adopted. As Andrew Watson of OtherNum put it:

It’s a great way to build an ecosystem, something more startups should do.

We saw it with the new retweet feature, and we saw it with the linking of hashtags to search results. This is just the next step in the process of recognizing crowdsourced features, something I’m excited to see (yes, because of the free app), but also because of the positive impact that this will have on the social network I’d have a hard time living without.

What do you think about the acquisition?

RSS is a huge part of my daily routine. One of the first things I do when I wake up is check my feeds, and I’m also perpetually connected via Reeder on my iPhone.

When I first saw a post on TechCrunch claiming that RSS is dead because of Twitter, I was surprised that people would come to this conclusion so quickly. Twitter’s an incredible tool for networking, but I don’t think that it’s ready, at least yet, to become a standard for content distribution. The collective nature of feeds outweighs the random, stream-type nature of Twitter, not to mention the fact that RSS is a protocol, while Twitter’s a central entity. People can deploy RSS wherever and whenever they please regardless of the existence and reliability of Twitter. What happens when we get a fail whale? Does everybody’s news distribution just stop?

Twitter’s great. Don’t get me wrong. And if you’d like to stop using RSS, that’s totally up to you. But I’ll keep my Google Reader account for now.