"Today, we're pleased to announce that the TweetDeck team has joined Twitter," Dick Costolo, Twitter's chief executive officer (CEO), said in a blog post.

    "This acquisition is an important step forward for us. TweetDeck provides brands, publishers, marketers and others with a powerful platform to track all the real-time conversations they care about," he added.

    Founded in 2008, TweetDeck now has a team of 15 and offers a real-time application that allows users to monitor abundance of information from social media services including Twitter in a single concise view.

    "Change may well be inevitable, but we remain the same team, staying in London, with the same focus and products, and now with the support and resources to allow us to grow and take on even bigger challenges," Iain Dodsworth, founder and CEO of TweetDeck, noted in a separate blog post.

    The deal is a defensive move for Twitter aimed at preventing TweetDeck from being purchased by rivals, some analysts said.

    Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed, but technology blog site TechCrunch and other U.S. media reported that Twitter paid 40 million to 50 million U.S. dollars.(本文由在线英语听力室整理编辑)