Twitter Strengthens Its Mobile Platform: Buys A/B App Tester Clutch.io, Shutting Down Service In November

Have the API wars around Twitter opened on a new front? Today comes news that the social networking site has made another acquisition: Clutch.io, a specialist in A/B testing for mobile apps. The news was announced on Clutch.io’s blog. The founders Eric Florenzano and Eric Maguire say that today was their first day working at Twitter on the company’s growth and international team, where they will “focus our efforts on Twitter’s product at a large scale.” Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Clutch.io users will have until November 1 to port their data from Clutch.io’s hosted service before it gets shut down. And in a nice twist, Florenzano and Maguire also say they’ll make it possible for users to port the whole system so that developers can run the service locally and continue to use it.
With the two now on board at Twitter, the deal sound like a classic acqui-hire, except that Twitter has also bought the IP from the startup. That IP includes “an easy to integrate library for native iOS applications designed to help you develop faster and deploy instantly,” according to Clutch.io’s site.
With Dalton Caldwell’s app.net nipping at Twitter’s feet with an ad-free Twitter alternative and a call for developers to join his march — along with the many other debates about how Twitter will develop its API going forward — this acquisition could raise some questions about whether Twitter has some other ideas in mind: will it use Clutch.io’s developer-focused IP in a new developer initiative, or is the intention to keep it as something it can use itself in-house?
Twitter’s acquisition track record has included social news startup Summify, blogging platform Posterous, email marketer RestEngine and Twitter client TweetDeck — all services you can see enhancing the Twitter experience either already or potentially down the road.
We have reached out to Twitter to ask for more detail and will update as we learn more. [Update: Twitter is not commenting further on this deal.]

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How to Publish Blogger on Twitter

Publishing your Blogger posts to your Twitter profile is a simple way to gain both exposure and traffic, but, as of the time of publication, Blogger does not offer a plug-in to post directly to Twitter. Blogger is, however, owned by Google, which means you can access other Google services with the Google ID associated with your Blogger account. Feedburner in particular offers a variety of services, including automatically sending your Blogger posts to your Twitter profile.

Instructions:

1. • Navigate to Feedburner.google.com and enter the Google ID and password you use for your Blogger blog as your login information. You can log into Feedburner with your Google ID even if you have never used the service before.
   • 2 Type the URL for your Blogger blog into the "Burn a feed right this instant" field and click the "Next" button.
   • 3 Click the button next to the RSS feed for your blog, then click the "Next" button. Click the "Skip directly to feed management" link to skip the setup process and go straight to your Twitter settings.
   • 4 Click the "Publicize" tab at the top of the Feedburner homepage, then click the "Socialize" link on the left.
   • 5 Click the "Add Twitter Account" button. Feedburner will redirect you to Twitter. Enter the login information for the Twitter account you want to use, then press the "Allow" button to authorize access to Google and Feedburner. Your browser will redirect you back to Feedburner.
   • 6 Click the tab next to "Post Content." Choose "Title Only" if you only want to tweet the title of your blog posts with a link to your Twitter profile. Select "Title and Body" if you want to tweet the title and the first few words of your blog post. Select "Body Only" if you only want to tweet the first few words of the body of your blog post.
   • 7 Check the box next to "Include link." This will include a shortened link in all of your tweets linking back to your post on Blogger.
   • 8 Click the tab next to "Hash tags" and select "Create hash tags from item categories" if you want to include active link keywords based on your post categories in your tweets. You can scroll down to the "Sample Item Preview" heading to view a sample of what your tweets will look like.
   • 9 Click the "Activate" button at the bottom of the page to save your settings and activate automatic posting from Blogger to your Twitter profile.

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