Last night I heard about Twitter acquiring the Tweetie iPhone application.  Tweetie, often raved as the best Twitter iPhone app, will now be offered for free instead of $2.99.  On Twitter’s blog, the company justified its acquisition, “People are looking for an app from Twitter, and they’re not finding one.”  I think they are right, and I’m happy they will be giving away the app.

When I heard the news, I was not surprised that they had released a native application, but I was surprised they had acquired another company to do it.

After waking up this afternoon (hey, don’t judge; I was up working until 10am), I was linked to this story on CNET. As the story shows, some view Twitter’s move as an attack on third-party developers and have compared it to Apple’s move with iPhone OS 4.0 (a move I do have reservations about).

To me, Twitter’s actions are significantly different from Apple’s, and significantly better for users and developers.  As I see it, Twitter is simply re-entering the market that made Twitter what it is.  It is NOT moving to block any third-party development.  The developer community is understandably nervous about any acquisitions and freebies, but, in this case, I think the anxiety is misplaced.

I’m a firm believer in competition and transparency. Twitter seems to be, too.  They have certainly encouraged developers to create external solutions through their API (application programming interface).  The Twitter API is well documented and allows access from a variety of languages and platforms, unlike Apple’s approach, which rules out anything not written in Objective-C.

Services like Seesmic go beyond a simple read/post interface and offer an expanded service (ability to post to updates to 50+ services), serving more than a generic recreation of Twitter. In contrast, Tweetable offers a generic read/post service that integrates with the admin panel of my blog, making Twitter available in a unique location.  I’m all for that.

Ultimately, innovation and improvement are the two greatest assets in any business model. Twitter’s acquisition of Tweetie shows it understands this logic well.  I wouldn’t be surprised if Twitter follows up by buying more related services or expanding internally in similar directions.

My favorite desktop Twitter application coming to Android! It’s true, I got the email last night and screenshots to prove it! I downloaded it to compare it against Twidroid pro, however it’s a free application vs a paid application so it wouldn’t be a fair comparison in my mind.

For a free Twitter application, it does the job and it does it well.  The application’s layout will seem natrual to Android users,while retaining general functionality of other twitter applications.  The application doesn’t have the same features of Twidroid’s premium application, like multiple accounts, Twitter lists or twittersphere.  Still the Seesmic application offers video uploading through Youtube, which is a great benefit in my opinion.

If Seesmic added multiple account support for their free application, it would make this a competitor to Twidroid Pro for me. Right now, the best part about it to me is that it is REALLY light, I hardly notice it running in comparison to other applications.

Here are some pictures (We all like pretty pictures):

Epic. Win. Not that I have a problem with Adobe AIR, hell, I love it.  I started using Seesmic on Adobe AIR before and it quickly became my favorite Twitter Desktop application.  Other then looking a lot prettier, it seems to run a lot smoother then the AIR application.   The application it’s self just released as Beta, but looks like it could be released tomorrow.

The first thing I noticed was that the Facebook interface hasn’t been added yet, however I seldom used it so I’m not all that disappointed.  After that, adjusting to the minor tweaks in the navigation was a breeze.  If nothing else, I felt it was a strong improvement past the aesthetic changes.

On the left side, there are tabs for” User lists”, “Searches”, “Accounts” and “All.”  Instead of cluttering all your accounts and searches together, Seesmic for Windows allows you to separate each group from each other.  Ideally, this improvement will allow you to split everything and follow specific queries rather than have everything pulling at once draining your API usage.

I haven’t got far into the settings yet, however it seems the options are about the same.  I need to further set it up, but I’m extremely impressed for a Beta in such an early release.

I for one hit that API limit taking screenshots and playing around, so here are some pictures: