I’m more than a little baffled by the new version of Tweetdeck. It has lost significant functionality compared to the previous versions. The new version:
- Can’t delete tweets.
- Can’t see the twitter @ name responsible for retweets because only the real name is shown.
- Can’t see from a profile whether that person is following me.
- Can’t reply to or retweet tweets when browsing another person’s timeline.
- Can’t send a tweet to Facebook as well as twitter when retweeting.
- Doesn’t show all of my tweets that have been favourited or retweeted, especially after a restart.
- Insists on quoting tweets instead of the traditional RT @name: tweet.
- Doesn’t copy hashtags into replies.
- Requires extra clicks to see conversations attached to a tweet.
- Won’t let me click in a column to select what scrolls with the mouse wheel as it loads the details for the tweet clicked on.
- Doesn’t reply to tweets within the columns any more, which means can’t reply to one tweet while composing another.
- Loses a tweet in progress if it is closed.
- The colour scheme includes significant white parts. The dark colour scheme of Tweetdeck helped me to communicate when migraines made white web pages hurt.
I’m baffled as to why they would break Tweetdeck like this. The cynical view is that Twitter want to break Tweetdeck so that people return to using the Twitter website directly, but that doesn’t entirely make sense. Tweetdeck provides abilities that Twitter just does not, like the ability to see tweets streamed in real time instead of periodic updates, and can show replies, messages and lists all at the same time alongside the timeline. If I were twitter I would brand Tweetdeck as Twitter Pro and call it a premium service. Instead they seem to be deliberately making it like the Twitter website and breaking it. Unfortunately there is still nothing better to move to.
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