How does one monetize a twitter client? I've been using TweetDeck and while its great I haven't looked at one ad. Nor have I paid for anything. Nor would I. I guess I'm not clear how they are worth $25million when they appear to have no revenue stream and are competing directly with Twitter and Facebook.

They don't. I don't think there's a 3rd party company who "makes a living" from selling twitter clients. In this space, money are made selling "social media analytics" to "enterprise" customers. And obviously it's easier to sell that when you have a "name" on the twitter client market. Now you see the connection ?

What could they possibly want with all these Twitter clients or owning a large chunk of the Twitter ecosystem?

  The UK-based TweetDeck had raised a little over $5 million in funding.

Then in the CrunchBase box below:

  Funding: 	$3.8M

Which is correct?

Anyway, congrats to TweetDeck, a friend of mine just started working there a few weeks ago so hope they go from strength to strength :)

Then again, the Ubermedia crunch-entry says they have 3.5M in funding. Less than TweetDeck!

And that's about 10x less than what they bought TweetDeck for. They probably raised a nice undisclosed round when they rebranded into UberMedia.

As a previous CrunchBase developer I can tell you that while it is usually pretty accurate there are times where it doesn't have a funding recorded. I usually go with what's written in the article because it is usually a quote directly from the source (in this case, $5M).