Twitter Inc. has made two moves to better control its users' mobile experiences - buying a company that makes a Twitter iPhone app and launching an official Twitter app for the BlackBerry. And the company is already planning an iPad app. Twitter CEO Evan Williams announced late Friday that the San Francisco microblogging service has entered into an agreement with Atebits LLC's Loren Brichter to buy the firm's iPhone application, Tweetie. Twitter will rename the application Twitter for iPhone and drop the current $2.99 price to free "in the coming weeks," Williams wrote in a blog post. Brichter will join Twitter's mobile team. "Loren's work won the 2009 Apple Design Award, and we will eventually launch Twitter for iPad with his help," Williams said. Earlier in the day, the company said BlackBerry maker Research in Motion began offering the first official Twitter app for that platform. "People everywhere should be able to access Twitter without friction or confusion," Williams wrote in announcing the Tweetie deal. "Careful analysis of the Twitter user experience in the iTunes App Store revealed massive room for improvement. People are looking for an app from Twitter, and they're not finding one. So, they get confused and give up. It's important that we optimize for user benefit and create an awesome experience." Twitter had relied on third-party developers to come up with its mobile apps, but Friday's announcements send out a different signal that could be a big topic of conversation when Twitter hosts its first developers conference, called Chirp, in San Francisco on Wednesday and Thursday.Source: www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/04/11/BU4U1CT52O.DTL
