“Twitter Buys Tweetie iPhone Client” confirms it – Twitter will be launching an official app for the iPhone, and it will be free.

But the Twitter team’s app isn’t brand new; they acquired Tweetie, a Twitter-branded mobile client that won a 2009 Apple Design Award. A BlackBerry app is on the way as well. Named “Twitter for iPhone,” the app will be optimized by Tweetie’s developer LorieBritcher. Not everyone is happy though – once the change happens, all other Twitter-capable apps will be “implicity labeled as second-class citizens,” possibly affecting Twitter’s success given the multitude of Twitter-capable mobile interfaces. But Twitter wants to avoid the “confusion” users experience when searching for a way to tweet on the go, and who can blame them? The microblogging site still has room for growth, and needs to dominate in the mobile market.

The SSN Take: Twitter’s open-source, friendly persona may be on the line with an official iPhone app.

Samuel Hartman, April 18, 2010

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