Twitter buys British app network TweetDeck

"Today, we're pleased to announce that the TweetDeck team has joined Twitter," Xinhua quoted Dick Costolo, Twitter's chief executive officer, as saying in a blog post.

"This acquisition is an important step forward for us. TweetDeck provides brands, publishers, marketers and others with a powerful platform to track all the real-time conversations they care about," he wrote.

Founded in 2008, TweetDeck offers a real-time application that allows users to monitor an abundance of information from social networking websites including Twitter in a single concise view.
"Change may well be inevitable, but we remain the same team, staying in London, with the same focus and products, and now with the support and resources to allow us to grow and take on even bigger challenges," Iain Dodsworth, founder and chief executive officer of TweetDeck, wrote in a separate blog post.

Analysts have said the deal was a defensive move for Twitter aimed at preventing TweetDeck from being purchased by rivals.

Though financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed, technology blog site TechCrunch reported that Twitter paid $40-50 million.