Twitter app store Oneforty acquired by HubSpot

Oneforty, entrepreneur and marketer Laura Fitton’s Twitter-for-businesses startup, was snapped up by marketing company HubSpot today.

HubSpot does inbound marketing, using attraction versus promotion to help customers find the stuff they want. It’s an alternative to traditional marketing which helping brands force-feed their products and messaging to the public.

“Inbound marketing makes marketing less crappy. It’s less about ‘sell sell sell’ and more about helping people buy,” said Fitton in an interview today.

The Oneforty core products — a catalog of third-party Twitter apps and SocialBase, a collaborative social media management platform — will be integrated with HubSpot’s current offerings.

Four of Oneforty’s six employees, including Fitton herself, will be working at HubSpot. Since the products will be integrated into HubSpot’s own, Oneforty employees will be dispersed within HubSpot to work on separate teams based on their areas of expertise.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Oneforty launched publicly in the fall of 2009. Fitton, who had previously authored Twitter for Dummies, was a capable marketer with a passion for social media and a sizable online following, thanks to her refreshing candor and moxie. As an entrepreneur, she was also creating something the ecosystem was truly beginning to need: a way to categorize, rate and promote good Twitter apps.

The startup raised $2.4 million at the end of 2009 and launched a commerce platform at the beginning of 2010. Then, just this summer, the company launched SocialBase, a product Fitton said “was what really got HubSpot interested.”

When we spoke to Fitton this afternoon, she was excited about transitioning away from the never-ending responsibilities of CEO-dom and back into a marketing role.

“There’s so much to tell the world about what’s going on here, and that’s what I love to do. It’s similar to the same Pistachio [consulting] thing I’ve done for years,” she said.

In looking back on her very early work with the then-nascent Twitter ecosystem, Fitton said being present at the very beginning of Twitter as a platform for other apps was one of her favorite thing about starting Oneforty.

“The excitement of being there when it all started — that was amazing. But things have to become established, or they won’t last. You can be nostalgic for the early stages, but that’s not sustainable. It has to evolve, and that’s cool.”

Fitton added, “I still think that software integrating Twitter’s data is going to change the world… and the economy. The same thing could be said for Google+. Everything that predicated our decision to start Oneforty is still true today.”