14 DAY TRIAL // TweetUp has just announced the acquisition of Twidroid, the developer of the number one Twitter client for Android devices. The company has also announced that it will change the name of the application into Twidroyd, in order to ensure minimal confusion with products from Lucas Films, trademark owner of the term “droid.” The new client will come as a standard app on wide range of upcoming Android phones from five important handset manufacturers.
“Acquiring Twidroyd provides 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.”
Together with the Twitter client, TweetUp will also acquire the popurls application, which sums up in one location the most popular content from the New York Times, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, Reddit, YouTube, Flickr and other news and social media sites. Both applications, Twidroid and popurls, should widen TweetUp's distribution network.
“In addition, the popurls website, which attracts users looking for a convenient guide to the most popular sites, news, videos and blogs on the Internet, will be a natural spot to display TweetUp search results and gain user feedback. This combination should enable us to more rapidly refine our offerings, generating better user experiences for distribution partners and for users searching for the world’s best tweeters regardless of their choice of devices,” mentioned Gross.
Coinciding with the announced acquisition, Twidroyd has also launched a new version of its Twitter client, v3.4.0 which changed the original name and added a 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.