Uber­Me­dia, which owns sev­er­al pop­u­lar ap­pli­ca­tions that in­ter­face with Twit­ter, is out­lin­ing plans to build a so­cial net­work that could com­pete with that pop­u­lar mi­croblog­ging plat­form, said three peo­ple who were briefed on the plans.The ser­vice would seek to at­tract users by ad­dress­ing com­mon com­plaints about Twit­ter, such as its re­stric­tion on the length of a mes­sage and how it can be con­fus­ing to new­com­ers, ac­cord­ing to these sources, who were not au­tho­rised to speak pub­licly about the plans.Uber­Me­dia is a lead­ing de­vel­op­er of apps and Web-based ser­vices that help users com­mu­ni­cate on Twit­ter and oth­er so­cial me­dia plat­forms. The Pasade­na, Cal­i­for­nia-based com­pa­ny has amassed a small em­pire of apps-among them Uber­So­cial, Echo­fon and Twidroyd-that con­nect to Twit­ter and of­fer fea­tures be­yond Twit­ter's own soft­ware.

To­geth­er, those Uber­Me­dia pro­grammes ac­count­ed for about 11.5 per cent of tweets sent on one day last month, ac­cord­ing to a study by mar­ket re­search firm Syso­mos. Uber­So­cial is the third most-pop­u­lar way to send tweets, be­hind Twit­ter's Web site and of­fi­cial iPhone app, the study found.Tweet­Deck is tied with Twit­ter's own Black­Ber­ry app as the fourth most-pop­u­lar soft­ware for send­ing mes­sages, Syso­mos said. Uber­Me­dia is in talks to ac­quire Tweet­Deck, but that deal hasn't been fi­nalised, ac­cord­ing to a per­son fa­mil­iar with the mat­ter. In­dus­try Web site TechCrunch first re­port­ed on the talks."The au­di­ence for Tweet­Deck is very dif­fer­ent" from the peo­ple who use Twit­ter's of­fi­cial apps, Tony Haile, a gen­er­al man­ag­er for Beta­works, said a year ago.

The tech­nol­o­gy in­cu­ba­tor is where Tweet­Deck start­ed. "We nev­er com­pet­ed on core func­tion­al­i­ty."Twit­ter has ex­pe­ri­enced rapid growth since its launch five years ago and now has about 200 mil­lion reg­is­tered users. Last week, Twit­ter said users were send­ing 155 mil­lion tweets a day, a 282per cenr in­crease over a year ago. Sign-ups over the most re­cent quar­ter were up 52 per cent com­pared with the year be­fore, Twit­ter said.