Twitter app TweetDeck raising angel round

TweetDeck, an application for organizing messages (“tweets’) received via microblogging service Twitter, is raising an angel round of funding. The round will total less than $500,000 and is led by Betaworks, according to All Things Digital’s Peter Kafka. Not bad for a one-man operation.

The application was built by Iain Dodsworth using Adobe’s AIR platform, which is used for creating hybrid web-desktop applications. TweetDeck’s big goal is to help users sort through the many tweets posted on Twitter by organizing them into different columns — initially one for general messages, one for direct messages, and one for replies, but you can create other groups. TweetDeck seems to be more popular than other third-party applications for accessing Twitter; Kafka points to TweetRush, which shows more than 120,000 tweets sent using TweetDeck for each of the last four days. Competitors Twhirl and Twitterriffic are in the 80,000 to 85,000-tweet range.

As for a business model, Dodsworth is more forthcoming than the executives at Twitter. He plans to sell a pro version of the software, and says he would be glad to pay Twitter for the use of its data, if it eventually decides to charge. Twitter itself will probably roll out its business plan soon, but there’s a part of me that would be delighted if third-party apps like TweetDeck get there first.

Twhirl, another AIR-based one-man operation, was acquired by video messaging startup Seesmic last year.