Paid Twitter search service TweetUp has announced it has acquired Twidroid, one of the leading Twitter clients for Google’s Android mobile operating system. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed; however, TweetUp has already announced it is renaming the app “Twidroyd”—to avoid confusion with both the Droid brand and any LucasArts characters—and says five (unnamed) Android phone makers plan to bundle Twidroyd with their devices.
Under the deal, TweetUp is also acquiring popurls, an aggregator service that tracks popular items from Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, the New York Times, and a selection of news and social media sites.
“We are extremely fortunate to have been able to join forces with TweetUp,” said Twidroid and popurls founder Thomas Marban, in a statement. “With their resources and experience along with the bundling deals we have developed with a number of the leading device manufacturers, we believe Twidroyd can widen its lead as the top Android client for Twitter users and aggressively grow our distribution while taking advantage of TweetUp’s business model for uncovering the best tweeters on topics of interest to our users.”
TweetUp works in a way similar to search keyword bidding on major search engines: users to “bid up” search terms, and services can present results based on those keyword bids. For instance, searching for a keyword on Seesmic presents both search results as well as tweets users have bid up to be presented with that keyword. TweetUp says its search results will be available through a variety of Twitter clients (including Twidroyd), as well as a selection of social media services and Web sites; some are already running, while more should be online in the next few weeks. TweetUp says its search results will be available to more than 40 million unique users a month.
