Twhirl’s service will remain free to users, so onlookers need not look to their wallets. Loic Le Meur presumably did a little digging, however, as the Twitter client has been acquired by his video chat company, Seesmic.
Loic Le Meur
Twhirl‘s price remains unknown, but on all other subjects, Le Meur has been extremely forthcoming. Want to know why Seesmic purchased Twhirl, for example? Le Meur lists a total of 20 reasons. “[Twhirl creator] Marco Kaiser is super cool and it is all about people” catches the PR side; “[Twhirl] is the #1 and coolest Twitter client with more than 100,000 downloads and 7% of all tweets posted per day” should convince statisticians.
The addition of video to Twhirl will remain optional, so fans who fear change needn’t worry about that. Also, in terms of what else is to come, we appear to be getting a preview thanks to a conversation on TechCrunch. Le Meur has promised Gabe Rivera a button that will return users to the main timeline, and he should “eliminate delays by getting tweets via XMPP instead of polling,” as well.
There are obviously some potential sticking points – Seesmic is still in alpha, and Twitter itself is notorious for suffering untimely outages. Yet on the whole, the deal looks like it could give quite a boost to microblogging.
