DabbleDB Acquired by Twitter
This is the kind of technology merger that never seems to go well - Twitter just bought DabbleDB:
Obviously this represents a new chapter in the life of Dabble DB, both for us as a team, and for the product itself. We’d like to assure you that, for now, we will continue to provide our software and technical support to current Dabble DB customers. However, we will be disabling new account signups effective immediately.
What the disablement means is that Twitter doesn't care about DabbleDB as a business; they bought technology and staff. However, that's where I get skeptical. DabbleDB is built on Squeak/Seaside, while Twitter is built on Ruby and Scala (apparently less Rails than it used to be). I have a hard time seeing the Twitter folks adopting Squeak; the typical pattern in these acquisitions is something like this:
- Those guys have great technology; let's buy it
- Their tech isn't built the same as ours; we'll take the ideas and rewrite it
- .... years pass
- ... original technology dies, completely new project that is less based on the acquisition than you might like to think appears
From the link above, it's clear that the purchase was all about the Trendly analytics stuff - which makes any future for DabbleDB itself even more murky, IMHO. This is obviously a nice exit for the DabbleDB folks, and that's great for them.
