Now why would Twitter pay $50m for Tweetdeck?

Lots of people reporting on rumours that Twitter is looking to acquire Tweetdeck for $50m. Tweetdeck has between 13% and 20% of the market share (depending on who you read, when) but those that it does have are the heavier users. Now, much though I love the service and those nice Tweetdeck people, the $50m question is why acquire - and at such an inflated price - a company that Twitter could just strangle or do a commercial deal with anyway? There are a number of possibilities:

(i) Acquiring Tweetdeck acquires these users onto an "owned" platform (though it's not clear why they would want to own them, as the revenue model for Twitter is not yet clear, there are only so many Ads you can throw at Uber-users before they migrate)

(ii) Defensive - Twitter don't want another major player owning Tweetdeck. It wasn't that long ago that there were rumours that UberMedia would buy them for $30m - soon after that Twitter threatened to turn UberMedia access off, thus they clearly are sensitive to this.

(iii) There is no deal - its rumour mongering by the Tweetdeck people to try and create an auction (and up the price)

(iv) Acccess to the Tweetdeck technology - unlikely - Tweetdeck is good, but it would take a fraction of $50m to reverse-engineer it.

(v) Update - acquire talent and a London base - yeeees, but that's a LOT of goodwill - $50m could buy a lot of that with a lot of spare change.

Speculation alert - at the moment option 2 is the best explanation for a deal - but at this stage in the game I would also think good old auction posturing is a good bet ( as does Caroline McCarthy at CNet) especially as no deal happened with UberMedia when one was reported.

I'd run a 50:50 on option 3 at this point. One to watch.