TWITTER IS SHUTTING DOWN TWEETDECK FOR WINDOWS: Funny, when I joined Twitter in December of 2008, Tweetdeck was Twitter for me. Built around multiple columns, with one for people in my Twitter Stream, another people responding to me, and another direct messages, Tweetdeck allowed me to have real time conversations, instead of trying to decipher the firehose of content coming out of my Twitter homepage. (That was back when I wanted to be interactive. After watching endless Twitter flamewars, I’m much happier to simply retweet interesting news and comments, and save my content creation for here and the main PJM site.)

“Twitter’s plan is to push all users to Twitter.com for their advertisement revenue,” as their stock price has cratered in recent months.  That that tends to happen when companies exit their original function to go full-on SJW instead. This despite the fact that “Tweetdeck is insanely popular among Twitter desktop users. They had previously bought the client.”

But this isn’t the first time that a Sillicon Valley corporation flush with cash has bought a product in order to eventually kill it.

The original version of Tweetdeck, which Twitter acquired in 2011 for $40 million from British software developer Iain Dodsworth ran on Adobe’s AIR platform. Adobe also has a record of buying out competitors seemingly only in order to kill their products. Serious Magic, which produced Ultra, the virtual set software I used on my Silicon Graffiti videos from 2008-2011 or so was remarkably easy to use and years ahead of its time. But in 2006, Adobe bought out the company, and eventually folded a half-assed version of Ultra into Premiere Pro and terminated the main platform because it was Windows-only, despite Ultra having produced a wide range of compatible virtual sets as accessory packs. Oh well — it was fun to be on the cutting edge of DIY video for a time.