The New Tweetdeck Is Tweet Trash
Twitter’s been pretty busy lately, rolling out updates across a number of their desktop and mobile client platforms, unveiling the “New, New Twitter”, yada yada yada. Upgrades are an accepted part of life, and barring a few change resistant luddites, we (users) usually accept with equanimity, no problem. Most updates solve pertinent problems or add needed functionality and are very welcome. However, when the upgrade turns out to be a downgrade in the user experience department (is there any other department?), then I’m forced to rant. And this particular rant has to do with my formerly beloved Tweetdeck for Chrome. Which, in my humble opinion, Twitter has succeeded in turning into tweet trash. While the new Tweetdeck still looks substantially like the one I used to know, it’s definitely become a mere shadow of itself , it’s now missing a lot of seemingly innocuous but very useful features that I found invaluable back then. I’ll list the ones I can remember before the app was upgraded while I wasn’t looking. Yeah, that’s what appeared to have happened, I didn’t even notice when the Chrome app updated itself.
Thumb Downs
Retweeting is now hell. Before, when I clicked retweet, I got a box that let me edit the RT before sending. If I didn’t want to edit I just went ahead and clicked the send button. Now I get a box that asks me if I want to quote the tweet before I can access the edit function, essentially making a function that used to need two clicks to now require three. Fail.
Conversation tracking is dead. And I’m like, what the… I can’t see conversations? How am I supposed to make sense of the firehose that Twitter is without putting it in the context of conversation threads. Jeez.
Update: I just found that conversation tracking is actually there somewhere, only it’s hidden. When you hit the reply button, you have to scroll UP to see the rest of the conversation. *Sigh*
Dropped support for other social networks. Okay, they paid 40million for the app, so it’s not like we didn’t see this one coming. Facebook’s kicked Twitter off Snaptu, a platform which was likely one of their biggest user bases, so you might say they’re even on that score. To their credit they’ve chosen not to deactivate linked Facebook accounts for people who already added them prior to the new tweetdeck. Issokay.
Inline media viewing for photo and video sharing services is gone, now the links open in another browser tab and you have to visit the media site like everybody else. Mega fail.
No more keyboard scrolling while navigating among your feeds, especially to get the ones that extend outside the available screen real estate. That just sucks, and no I don’t want to use the ‘really intuitive’ navigation bar that I have to go all the way to the top of the screen with my mouse to use.
The desktop app used to be an Adobe AIR powered social media powerhouse packed full with features like new follower counts, show what’s popular, twitter trends, enhanced profile viewing insights, drag and drop media/link support, e.t.c. But given the strained relationship between Twitter and Adobe, Tweetdeck is now off AIR, so the new desktop app is just the same junk that the web and Chrome apps are. The former AIR powered app still works though…for now.
It’s Not That Important
These are all the fails I could come up with in one sitting. I wouldn’t describe myself as a power user, but I found the above features useful and suddenly I no longer have access to them. Considering that Tweetdeck used to be the cream of the crop of powerful social media dashboards, I’m just disappointed that Twitter has decided to dumb it down this much. Thankfully it doesn’t appear to be showing any weakness in the speed department, it’s still looking to be as fast as it was before Twitter got to it. But maybe I’m not being fair, I might at least allow that subsequent updates might address the above listed deficiencies right? Well it’s not really important, it’s not like this post really matters, after all I’m just one user. One user who’ll have to find another Twitter client that is actually useful. I’ll be back when the new Tweetdeck is.
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