Earlier this year Twitter advised developers to stop building Twitter Clients. Since then Twitter entered in to a must-win battle with UberSocial for Tweetdeck and successfully acquired the premier professional Twitter client. I use it everyday on my Mac and iPhone. It is, or was a great twitter client.
In the past couple of weeks Twitter has released their new UI on the world and have also released a new Tweetdeck to the Mac App Store. The New Tweetdeck is a complete new product. It jettisons the AIR platform and implements a new UI where the only similarity with the old Tweetdeck seems to be the color scheme.
The new Mac Tweetdeck seems to require extra clicks to do anything. You can't scroll across multiple columns one at a time. They scroll in screenfuls. Try to direct message someone and you get a text box saying "Message twitterhandle" When you start typing the text disappears and you enter a larger text box with no nlue as to who you are direct messaging. If you get distracted by a phone call and come back to Tweetdeck you have no clue who you are responding to.
IT also looks like you can no longer link Tweetdeck to your LinkedIn account.
Translation - Gone.
Column filtering - Gone.
My advice is stick with the current AIR-based iteration of Tweetdeck. The new app makes a mockery of the Tweetdeck name. Twitter may not want people building new Twitter Clients but there is a significant "Professional" base of users that need more than a standard Twitter client and if Twitter is going to cripple Tweetdeck there is going to be a number of those pro users, myself included that will be looking for a cross-platform Professional Grade Twitter Client.
There are still Twitter clients out there like:
- Echofon
- Janetter
What is your favorite Twitter client that offers a similar multi-column format like Tweetdeck?
