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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Facebook Lets You Announce That You’re Expecting A Baby

Facebook seems to be feelings its biological clock ticking, as today it launches a new Timeline event that lets you share that you’re expecting a baby, the due date, and whether it’s a boy or girl. Baby announcements appear in the Celebrations home page sidebar beside birthdays on the day the kid is expected to pop out, along with showing up in the news feed. Facebook tells me it’s exploring whether the feature will power an existing advertising option to target “expecting parents” that could be very lucrative.
This new life event for expecting a baby also opens up a new advertising is another sign that Facebook is maturing as its original user base of college kids from 2004 start hatching little ones who can join Facebook 13 years from now.

The feature replaces a more confusing option to add an “Expected: Child” to your list of family members. You can add a baby life event by selecting the announcement from the Life Events drop down in the publisher on your Timeline. Facebook doesn’t discriminate about who can say they’re expecting. Single, in a civil union, or otherwise, you can still say a kid is on the way.
You can add additional info like who the other parent is, location (is that conceived or where it will be born?), and a longer story. You can set a future publishing date if you want to wait until the bump starts to show. Also, you can add a photo to the story, which might encourage more ultrasounds to end up on Facebook. That Unbaby.me extension for removing photos infants from your feed is about to get a lot more useful if it can detect fetuses too.

Once published, the story will appear in the news feed immediately, and grace the Celebration sidebars of friends’ home pages on the due date. Facebook has offered an “expecting parents” ad targeting option for about six months but it was essentially guessing based on what Pages you Liked and other options.
Now it will have concrete structured data about who’s a parent-to-be. It won’t be using this data to power ad targeting just yet, but you can imagine how useful advertisers would find the ability to accurately target expected parents with ads for maternity clothes, parenting classes, strollers, and anything else someone needs to be a mom or dad. The ads would likely be popular with the rapidly spawning babyTech companies chasing the big money people pay to be world-class moms and dads


Today’s feature release follows the added ability to announce the date of your upcoming marriage on Facebook. And who knows, maybe the push is Zuck’s subtle way of saying him and his new bride are expecting. Just kidding. This is about making Facebook a host for the most important moments in your life, and maybe making some money off those moments down the line.

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