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£1.2m deal for the man who makes it easier to Twitter
Mark Prigg, Science and Technology Editor20 Aug 2009
Twitter may have taken the world by storm but internet experts have spent months trying to make it easier to use.
Now one Londoner has secured £1.2 million funding after developing TweetDeck — a filter system that sorts Twitter messages into queues on a computer or mobile phone screen.
After becoming annoyed at missing tweets sent by his friends, 35-year-old computer programmer Iain Dodworth wrote a small piece of software to allow him to easily filter messages from them. He then let friends try it out, before being persuaded to release it online in June last year.
The software, which is also available on the iPhone, has become hugely popular, with several million copies downloaded. It is thought that up to 20 per cent of all tweets are being sent via the application.
This week TweetDeck secured investment of £1.2 million from a range of backers including Brent Hoberman, who co-founded Lastminute, and Bebo founder Michael Birch, to develop the software further.
Mr Hoberman said: “We really wanted to get involved with TweetDeck as it's a British company with lots of momentum and energy.”
He has worked with Mr Birch to set up a new venture capital firm for dotcoms, Pro Founders Capital, which he describes as “the real dragons' den”.
Mr Dodworth told how he developed his idea: “I was working in the financial sector designing software and was between projects so spent some time playing with Twitter. I realised that while it is great, there is just a flood of messages.
“What I wanted was a way to filter out the messages from people I really want to hear from, but also stay subscribed to people I might want to read occasionally. I just thought I may as well do it myself.”
The TweetDeck software consists of columns, each displaying messages from a group of people. For instance, you can set up a column called “friends” which only displays messages from those you know. A separate column shows all tweets.
Facebook updates can be shown, and there are plans to include updates from other sites.
“Once I had written the software some friends were asking about it so I gave them a copy. That really spiralled, and I got inundated with people asking for it, so decided to make it available for free. It just snowballed.”
Although the firm currently gives away the software, it has made money by creating customised versions, including one for the band Blink 182.
Mr Dodworth was able to employ four people to help him, and also move out of the family home in Tunbridge Wells to offices in Shoreditch. “We realised that there really was a business here,” he said.
Tweetdeck is also about to test adverts on screen. “Advertising is a great source of revenue, but we also don't want to annoy users by bombarding them with ads,” said Mr Dodworth. “It is something we are experimenting with, and will hopefully be launching our first ad version in a few weeks.”
