New York — Paid Twitter ad program and search engine service TweetUp, on Tuesday disclosed that it has added another company called Twidroid to its arsenal, developer of the most popular Twitter clients for Google’s Android mobile operating system.
The company has also said that it will also rename the application to be called as “Twidroyd,” in order to avoid legal issues as well as eliminate any misunderstanding with products from Lucas Films, trademark owner of the term “Droid”.
“Acquiring Twidroyd empowers TweetUp with a number of strategic advantages,” said Bill Gross, CEO of TweetUp. “Twidroyd is widely considered the best Twitter client for Android phones and it leads in market share, so its growing base of users will be a valuable source of well-informed feedback on TweetUp search on mobile devices.”
Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but under the deal, TweetUp is also acquiring popurls, an aggregator service that tracks popular items from The New York Times, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, Reddit, YouTube, Flickr and a selection of news and social media sites. Both applications, Twidroid and popurls, should widen TweetUp’s distribution network.
“Combined, Twidroid and popurls will support TweetUp with a broad distribution network on which to experiment and refine its platform for finding the world’s best tweeters.,” TweetUp said.
“We are extremely privileged to have been able to join forces with TweetUp,” said Twidroid and popurls founder Thomas Marban, in a statement. “With their vast pool of resources and experience along with the bundling deals we have developed with a number of the leading device manufacturers, we believe Twidroyd can widen its lead as the top Android client for Twitter users and aggressively grow our distribution while taking advantage of TweetUp’s business model for uncovering the best tweeters on topics of interest to our users.”
TweetUp anticipates that the unified acquisitions will endow it with a wider distribution network. “This combination should enable us to more rapidly define our offerings, generating better user experiences regardless of their choice of devices,” says Gross.
TweetUp works in a way similar to search keyword bidding on prominent search engines: users to “bid up” search terms, and services can deliver results based on those keyword bids.
For example: On Seesmic, searching for a keyword presents with a list of results, with certain tweets given precedence if the users have bid for them. TweetUp claims that its search results will be available through a number of Twitter clients (including Twidroyd), apart from a selection of social media services and Web sites; some of which are already running, while more should be online in the next few weeks. TweetUp says its search results will be available to more than 40 million unique users a month.
“Moreover, the popurls website, which engages users searching for a handy guide to the most popular sites, news, videos and blogs on the Internet, will be a standard place to display TweetUp search results and gain user feedback,” Gross said.
The service will be activated on TweetDeck, Seesmic, and Twidroyd; Conduit, TwitterFeed, Netvibes, and Klout, in addition to Websites like BusinessInsider and Answers.com. The ads will be made live throughout all of these sites during the next few months, TweetUp said, prompting the network total to 40 million unique users per month and serve more than 100 million impressions per month, it said.
Furthermore, to coincide with the acquisition, Twidroyd has also bundled the new version of its Twitter client, v3.4.0 with added set of new features: all-new widgets; shorten links before sending via button; image preview with pinch-zoom; tweetup search; suggest a feature box; warning when text exceeds 140 chars; enhanced design of sharing widget; action buttons unified; Brazilian Portuguese language; OAuth authentication; allow install on SD card (android 2.2); a series of small tweaks to deal with twitter’s regular downtime.