Tweetie to become free after Twitter acquisition

Twitter has acquired iPhone Twitter client Tweetie, as it looks to end the “massive confusion” surrounding the services on the iPhone.

“Careful analysis of the Twitter user experience in the iTunes AppStore revealed massive room for improvement,” said Twitter CEO Evan Williams in a post on the company’s blog. “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 optimise for user benefit and create an awesome experience.”

Some amazing stuff will soon be possible, both in terms of simplifying the Twitter experience and in allowing people to use Twitter any place they might be

Tweetie will be renamed Twitter for iPhone and changed to a free app (it’s currently £1.79 in the UK and $2.99 in the US). Williams said the move would allow the site to gather more users from the smartphone sphere, but also sought to ease the worries of developers, who fear this could mean the end of their third-party Twitter clients.

“Millions more active, engaged, mobile users mean more opportunities for all of us,” he wrote.

“Developers, services, and publishers will be able to leverage the Twitter iPhone and iPad applications to create additional innovative tools and integrations for users,” he said, after developers of other third-party Twitter clients became worried that this would mean the end of their apps.

Tweetie’s developer Loren Brichter will be joining Twitter’s mobile team from Atebits to create the official app and a Twitter platform for the Apple iPad. “Some amazing stuff will soon be possible, both in terms of simplifying the Twitter experience and in allowing people to use Twitter any place they might be,” Brichter wrote in a post on the Atebits blog.