TweetDeck’s AIR, Android, iOS Applications To Go Dark On May 7th

by Michael Mayday

Twitter fiends, Air advocates, TweetDeck evangelicals — prepare your libations, TweetDeck will go offline on May 7th. The TweetDeck made the sad announcement in a blog post on Friday, clarifying what the team meant by its initial “early May” estimate.

For those who don’t know: TweetDeck’s AIR, Android and iPhone variations are set to be removed from their respective marketplaces and no longer function. TweetDeck’s Facebook integration will also be snuffed out on the May 7th date.

The death of TweetDeck’s mobile applications stems from the TweetDeck team’s apparent desire to focus on its web application experience. In a post on TweetDeck’s blog, the team stated its app support is merely following the trends of power users who’re increasingly turning to Twitter’s official application for mobile and TweetDeck’s online application for laptop and desktop use.

But the team also stated it’ll continue to support TweetDeck for the Mac and PC, and will closely accompany updates to the Web and Chrome versions of the application, according to The Next Web. But that doesn’t mean the dedicated programs won’t be killed off in a future update or business decision by Twitter.

Twitter, as some may recall, has been on a restrictive tear with its newest API — arbitrarily limiting the number of users each application is allowed to have at 100,000. The new API also restricted how Tweets are to be displayed in each applications and requires certification for each Twitter client.

Those restrictions suggest a more business-centric Twitter, which could be either a good or bad thing, depending on your views. On one hand, the restrictions give a more unified Twitter experience across platforms and clients, making things much easier for users. On the other, it’s severely restricts innovation on the micro-blogging platform, and feels like it’s intentionally leaving its power-user crowd behind.

The restrictions also have the effect of pushing many users to the official iPhone, Android and iPad Twitter applications.

Twitter bought TweetDeck for $40 million in May 2011.

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