It’s always been a favourite here at AllTwitter, and social media dashboard HootSuite continues to grow at an astonishing pace.

The platform is celebrating its five millionth signup – which represents amazing growth of one million new users in no time at all – and users across all of HootSuite’s social networks and applications have now sent a combined 1.3 billion messages in 20 languages around the world.

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Yesterday, there was a piece in Forbes that was waxing lyrical about new social network Pheed, which, thanks to some heavy celebrity sign-ups, is being pitched as “the new Twitter”.

Yeah, we’ve been here before. Many, many times. Of course Pheed isn’t the new Twitter. But, curious as I am, I signed up to take a look.

And then Pheed immediately auto-posted to my Twitter profile.

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I’m pretty picky when it comes to my Twitter clients of choice.

After signing up first, of course, on Twitter.com, as pretty much everyone did back in the heady days of 2008, I moved on to TweetDeck, then Seesmic Desktop, before eventually settling on HootSuite.

That’s just on the desktop, of course. On my mobile, I went from Twitter mobile, to TinyTwitter, to Dabr (that link is worth a look just to see what we had to put up with in 2009), to UberTwitter (Blackberry), HootSuite (iPhone), the official Twitter app (iPhone) and then Tweetlogix (iPhone), the latter of which I heartily recommend to all and sundry.

I also tried Tweetbot on my iPhone, too, but for some reason never took to it. Which is strange, as it’s far and away my favourite iPad Twitter app. Just gorgeous and super slick. And now it’s out on Macs, officially, I really, really want it.

Except it’s $19.99. And that’s a lot to pay for any Twitter client.

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Once upon a time, TweetDeck was, for many users, the Twitter client of choice.

As one of the first platforms to support configurable columns, TweetDeck quickly established itself as the de facto standard for power-browsing on Twitter, and this continued for years.

Right up until Twitter bought it.

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With its latest update (and as we speculated yesterday), Twitter has removed all third party image services – which includes yFrog, Twitpic, Mobypicture, Twitgoo, img.ly and Posterous – from the latest update of its official apps for iPhone, iPad and Android.

As of right now, the only image service option you have with one of these official Twitter apps is Twitter’s own internal photo sharer, which is another step in the micro-blogging firm’s planned journey to an all-consuming media empire powerhouse. After all, ads on external photo services don’t pay those mounting server bills.

You’ll have your own views on this. I rarely upload photos using Twitter so it’s no big deal to me. However, what is a big deal is how my profile page looks, and this new update from Twitter has also unveiled Facebook-like profile cover photos… except they’re utterly, utterly hideous.

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Last April, I took a look at the products that Twitter staff members were using to send their tweets, publishing the results on our sister blog, Social Times. Back then, some 85 percent of all tweets from Twitter employees came via official Twitter products, with 32 percent of those from Twitter.com.

Fast-forward almost a year later, and Twitter’s stranglehold on how its employees tweet has increased – a heady 94 percent of all staff tweets now come from official Twitter products.

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Earlier today HootSuite announced an upgrade which included a new set of tools they’ve bracketed within a new option on the site called Publisher, which is intended to provide greater control, options and reportage for HootSuite Pro and Enterprise users when scheduling tweets.

I can see where they’re coming from with this idea but I’m not a fan of this change for a number of reasons that I’ll get to in a moment. More importantly, however, is that this upgrade appears to have broken the scheduling functionality completely for a lot of people, meaning thousands and thousands of tweets have gone unpublished throughout the day. And as HootSuite is a business tool for many users, and one that they pay for, they’re not very happy about it. And have taken to Twitter to complain.

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Back in April we wrote about speculation that Twitter was in ‘advanced talks’ to buy the popular Twitter client TweetDeck, based on a story in The Wall Street Journal. This, of course, followed rumours that TweetDeck had been acquired by Twitter-competitor and eternal thorn, Ubermedia.

Earlier this month, TechCrunch quoted sources that suggested that Twitter had indeed bought TweetDeck, but no further evidence materialised.

Now, finally, the deal is done. CNN announced last night that TweetDeck has been officially purchased by Twitter for more than $40 million in a mix of cash and stock.

So… what happens next?

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All of your users are ultimately Twitter’s users as well. However, they choose to use your applications for various reasons from preferring your user experience over Twitter’s own to features you offer that can’t be found elsewhere to not having other options on their desired handset/OS/language. In many cases they have voted with their wallets, preferring to purchase your app or pay for your monthly service over using Twitter’s free apps and services. Yes, paying customers expect support, but they are also less likely to move on to something else and lose their investment in money and time.
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Earlier this week Twitter announced on their blog and to the developer community a change to their API permissions system to give users greater control over what applications can access and do with each user’s account. This seemingly minor change has caused big ripples in the development community.
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