TweetDeck Chief Iain Dodsworth Departs Twitter

Iain Dodsworth, founder of the power-user application TweetDeck, announced Friday that he is leaving Twitter two years after TweetDeck was acquired by the microblogging company.

“Two years since the @TweetDeck acquisition and now feels like a perfect time to start something new. Goodbye @Twitter, it’s been marvellous,” Dodsworth said in a tweet on Friday morning. (The picture to the left is Dodsworth celebrating with his soon-to-be-former colleagues.)

Dodsworth didn’t give specifics on his next venture, but given that the departure comes almost two years to the day his company was acquired, it’s likely he was staying through the end of an agreed-upon retention contract.

Questions arose as to the future of TweetDeck in recent months, given that Twitter decided to kill its Adobe Air and native mobile apps. Dodsworth’s departure could be seen as a foreboding sign for the future of the product as a whole.

I doubt that, though. Two weeks ago Twitter hired Sharath Bulusu, a new product manager who will head up the project after Dodsworth’s departure. And the company nearly doubled the size of the TweetDeck team over the past year.

My hunch — expect continued focus on TweetDeck for the Web. In the post where TweetDeck for Air was put to pasture, it’s where Twitter emphasized most of its efforts for the future. “In many ways, doubling down on the TweetDeck web experience and discontinuing our app support is a reflection of where our TweetDeck power-users are going,” the blog post read.