I meant to post on this a couple of weeks ago, but forgot...

This report on ProgrammableWeb describes the purchase of Twhirl by Seesmic. Nothing strange in an acquisition, but in this case it's interesting that in Twhirl's case we have a lone developer creating something that is effectively just a wrapper over several existing APIs. (No criticism of the application by the way!). So, there's value in the UX etc. but essentially nothing that couldn't be reproduced by another designer/developer. Or at least - there's no special sauce here, how it is done is easily understood.

So why the acquisition?

Loic Le Meur of Seesmic lists 20 reasons why they acquired Twhirl. I agree with most of the reasons listed, but I suspect that the most important is the second on the list:

Thwirl is the #1 and coolest Twitter client with more than 100,000 downloads and 7% of all tweets posted per day

And there we have it: leveraging an existing user base of an already successful service through a very popular tool should drive that user base to Seesmic.

My only concern is that I'm not sure there's enough data to understand the transience of an audience of a given tool. Maybe Twhirl will lose out to some existing or new tool. That could happen really fast too.

On the other hand, there's a significant opportunity for developers to take advantage of this economy (just like Facebook apps!). Similarly, making access to APIs super-simple is key to technology choice for developing these applications:

• LINQ capabilities which make accessing XML-based services a breeze, which leaves more time to get that all-important UX differentiation in place.
• Data-binding capabilities such as those in Silverlight and WPF make the representation and transformation of data to the UI that much faster too.
•  Take a look at this Digg mashup as an example.

Finally, whilst each app is great I really don't want a raft of these applications on my desktop - it'd be great to see something exploiting the .NET 3.5 AddIn capabilities to plug in the various services I use (Digg, Twitter, Delicious etc.) and become the preferred 'container' for a bunch clients...