twitter bought tweetdeck. now what? (hint: think enterprise)

Now that Twitter has unofficially officially bought TweetDeck, the question remains: “What the heck are they going to do with it?”

The accepted narrative of the purchase is that this was a defensive move by Twitter. That is, they picked up TweetDeck in order to prevent UberMedia, owner of many other Twitter clients that aren’t made by Twitter, from snatching up TweetDeck and in turn snatching more Twitter market share. Under this premise, it would be perfectly understandable if Twitter simply decided to shutter TweetDeck, kindly ask its existing user base to move over to the official Twitter app and pay Ian Dodsworth to please stop working (or at least work on something non-Twitter related, maybe his new gold house and his rocket car?)

Personally, I don’t like that idea. I don’t like the idea of paying someone good money — hell, great money — just so you can take their product apart and ask them to go away. If I were at Twitter, (alright, pause for a good laugh) I would be pushing to turn TweetDeck into an Enterprise-level software aimed at companies currently managing their social media streams through products like CoTweet and HootSuite. After all, TweetDeck already has many of the features these services have — scheduling tweets, list management, multiple accounts, and access to other social services.

Imagine if Twitter could combine the services TweetDeck already offers with the ability to purchase and manage promoted tweets and accounts within the system; deep statistics on click-throughs, reach and impressions; real influence data on users and real-time conversation monitoring. And that’s just off the top of my head.

To me, turning TweetDeck into a product like that is much more interesting than just shit-canning the whole thing. But, it also represents some significant mission drift for Twitter and it might not be something they want to get into. After all, the enterprise race is moving quickly and companies like SalesForce/Radian6 have already made huge strides in mining social stream for data. It’s unlikely Twitter will be able to catch up in this area, but it could find a nice middle ground servicing smaller companies and power users that can’t pay thousands of dollars for a heavy enterprise solution.

One piece of advice for Twitter: If you decide to move forward with TweetDeck, please for the love of all that is holy, get it off of Adobe Air. I don’t much care whether you make it a web app, a desktop app or a frickin’ ham sandwich, but please no more Adobe Air. Nothing, nothing, good ever comes out of Adobe Air. It simply turns good apps into garbage.