TweetDeck Changes: My Thoughts

TweetDeck is a dashboard based program designed to manage your Twitter and Facebook accounts. It is the most popular Twitter application with well over 20% of the overall market share. It was a great program for both individual use and business use as it allowed you to manage multiple Twitter and Facebook accounts with ease. On May 25th 2011, Tweetdeck was bought out by Twitter for a estimated 40 to 50 million dollars. On September 15th 2011, Twitter announced it would be making changes to TweetDeck to make it "more consistent with Twitter.com". 13 days ago (as of the posting of this article) Twitter made true with those promises, completely re-vamping TweetDeck, I had high hopes for the new TweetDeck that fell completely flat after using it.

The new interface looks very similar to the old, with some slight graphic enhancements to make it more like Twitter.com's interface. They have also made the interface a little more user friendly by making the settings bar drop down from the individual columns instead of having to go to a separate window which was a little convoluted and messy. However when you start messing around with the settings you'll notice how bare they are. It seems Twitter has stripped away most of the customization options from the settings and have also completely dropped support for LinkedIn, Google Buzz, Forsquare and Myspace. It also only allows you to view 3 columns at a time, no more or less. This is incredibly frustrating for people like me who enjoy having only 2 columns visible at a time to conserve space on my secondary monitor.

Despite the cleaner more user friendly design, the new TweetDeck is terrible. I would stick with the old version of it if I were you as I have done the same. Hopefully Twitter will make some changes to this once great service to make it par with the original.

* TweetDeck logo is © 2012 Twitter, the usage of this logo qualifies as fair use under the US copyright law.