Twitter kills off TweetDeck apps

Twitter has announced that it is discontinuing three of its TweetDeck apps for iPhone, Android and Air.

Twitter announced in a blog post that the TweetDeck applications would be pulled from the clients' respective app stores in early May and would stop working shortly after that.

Many users choose to access the microblogging site using applications developed by third parties.

The demise of these apps marks an end to the heyday of third-party Twitter clients, a process begun last year when the company tightened its guidelines and "effectively wrestled developers into a choke-hold", according to Readwrite.com.

According to the Twitter blog, the company will be focusing it's efforts on its "modern, web-based versions of TweetDeck". This is unlikely, at least initially, to placate those users who are loyal to the older versions, particularly TweetDeck Air, which has a large following.

The British company TweetDeck was bought by Twitter in 2011 for $40m so the site could gain control of one of the most popular ways of viewing its own content.