On the same day we posted about Twitter passing on an acquisition deal with Facebook, we got official confirmation that Twitter has acquired a different company. On the Twitter blog, CEO Ev Williams announced that Twitter has acquired the assets of Values of n, which includes web-projects I Want Sandy and stikkit, but the most important acquisition is the engineer behind them, Rael Dornfest.

Rael has served as the Chief Technology Officer at O’Reilly Media and is well known for his work on RSS. Over the last couple of months he has been working with the Twitter team as a consultant and will be officially joining the User Experience Group at Twitter as an engineer.

This may also be a unique situation for Twitter. Rael has been openly welcomed to the team and he has stated that they work incredibly well together. However, as Rael responded to congratulatory tweets, he has confirmed he will be working remotely in Portland (see tweets here and here).

Sadly, with this acquisition I Want Sandy and stikkit will be closing shop on December 8th at the close of the business day. Both blog posts from Ev and Rael hint that this is not the end for the services. Their future is unclear at this time, but I would expect aspects of each of the services to be slowly integrated into Twitter over time as the team continues to develop their product and search for a business model (perhaps even that one that includes charging businesses to use it and adding features to improve organization and productivity).

Congrats to the Twitter team and Rael!