Bye bye Cotweet freemium

Cotweet has been one of the few successful Twitter clients that survived Twitter's efforts to consolidate its clients.  It was one of the first products (may be the first) to recognize that incoming tweets can be follow-up item that your team has to respond on.  It offered users a way to assign incoming tweets to someone else to create workflow, and mapped the Twitter functionalities into email paradigm to make it easy for new users to pick up Twitter.

Since ExactTarget's acquisition of Cotweet back in March 2010, Cotweet has been available, as it has always been, free of charge to all users.  But as of last week, I got the following email from ExactTarget:

Cotweet has built up enough faithful followers over the years, and most of existing enterprise customers will continue to use the platform.  What would be interesting is how rapidly Cotweet will evolve and keep pace with other freely available tools when it's taken down from freemium model. 

This move from ExactTarget will certainly alienate small-to-medium business and individual users.  Quora, ExactTarget blog where the first announcement was made, and Mashable are already buzzing with free Cotweet replacement candidates.  So far it seems like this news will be a boon for Hootsuite and GroupTweet.