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There is a new news site in town that has already become my de facto place to read tech news. Lobste.rs was founded by Joshua Stein as a response to getting banned from Hacker News. I never liked Hacker News very much but Lobste.rs is fantastic! It is invite only to avoid spam. If you need an invite, let me know.

This is also my first link log post. If you don't know what that is, you probably haven't read The Daring Fireball Linked List or Marco.org. You can differentiate link log posts by the arrow following the title. You can still link to the individual post here by clicking on the date rather than the title.

Twitter Acquires TweetDeck for $40 Million (Updated)

As reported by CNNMoney, sources have stated that Twitter has acquired TweetDeck for $40 million made up of cash and stock. The deal has not been officially announced by either Twitter or TweetDeck. As has been discussed in tech news since February, Twitter had to either buy TweetDeck or put up with a major competitor that could substantially cut into Twitter's ad revenue if UberMedia were to snap up TweetDeck instead.

Reportedly the talks regarding UberMedia purchasing TweetDeck ground to a halt sometime earlier this year and Twitter took the opportunity to step up and purchase TweetDeck instead. UberMedia's Twitter clients, UberSocial, Twidroyd, and EchoFon are direct competitors to both Twitter's own clients and TweetDeck.

Twitter's purchase of TweetDeck was definitely a wise move on Twitter's part and means that Twitter now controls one of the largest clients of its service. TweetDeck runs on many mobile and desktop platforms and is frequently used by Twitter "power users."

It will be interesting to see if Twitter continues TweetDeck's development in the current vein or if it integrates some features into its own Twitter app which was acquired by buying out Tweetie, another third party Twitter client.

Update: TweetDeck announced the sale to Twitter on their blog this morning and now Twitter has done the same.