Iain Dodsworth is the British-born founder of TweetDeck, a company well known for its social client of the same name. According to reports, including those from The Guardian newspaper, Dodsworth may be interested in selling the company to Twitter themselves, for the not-inconsiderate sum of 50 million US dollars (around 30 million GBP / 34.92 million Euros). Dodsworth had previously been offered a sum of 30,000,000USD for the company by Bill Gross, an American entrepreneur.
Previous rumors about the future of TweetDeck have suggested possible takeover attempts by Google and Facebook. The TweetDeck client is a well-known tool of experienced Twitter users due to its cross-platform unity and real-time updates. As TweetDeck runs on the Adobe AIR platform it can be used across Macintosh system, as well as Windows, and Linux.
Despite having only fifteen employees, TweetDeck could become an extremely expensive purchase for Twitter themselves. Should TweetDeck be snapped up by the very company it was created to work alongside, the future of other Twitter clients could become cloudy. Twitter has already made it clear they want a fairly similar experience across all platforms, with a comparatively small number of clients, as this article suggests. Twitter founder Biz Stone has stated that the company"s main concentration at the current moment in time is making strategic acquisitions and growing the company"s revenue. Twitter is among the most popular sites in the world, ranking as the ninth most popular site in the world for March 2011, according to Alexa.