TweetDeck teardown

One of the big bits of news out today was the release this morning of an updated version of TweetDeck. Now I realize that this is the darling Twitter app everyone just loves to use and for the most part I can see why.

The way the columns are added for the different timelines and services is nice and easy. Each of the columns have individual options – depending on the service. For Twitter related columns the two really handy options are:

Popular

This option lets you see what popular tags and names are the most popular.

When you select the Popular button a small panel will be displayed at the bottom of the column showing the popular items.

Clicking the Popular button will close it.

Filter

I know myself there have been times where I’ve gone looking for a specific message so this is a nice feature to have. Just click on the Filter button

This will open up the Filter panel for the column which is where you can select whether you want to filter based on: text, name, source, or time. Then as you enter in the say the text to search for the list will update based on what you have typed so far.

I can really see why people really like TweetDeck but there are still some things about that irritate me to the point that TweetDeck won’t be becoming my principal Twitter client at this point.

One of the major reasons is it’s lack of spam filters which is something that I really liked about using bDule, or rather Sobees Lite as it has been renamed. Being able to filter out some of the more irritating Twitter crap (Spymaster and other such stuff) makes for a more enjoyable time using Twitter.

Along with that being a major deal breaker for me the way that TweetDeck handles notifications could do with some fine tuning. On the whole it’s not bad but what would be really nice it to be able to get notifications based on keywords, individual followers, or even if a trending topic is hitting your timeline.

Now the rest of these points are all minor but added together, regardless of how picky they might seem, are reasons why I’ll be taking a pass on TweetDeck at this point.

The big one – font size! Like come on people just how hard is it to add in the option to let us select the size of font we want to use for stuff to be displayed in. This has always been my major bitch point when it comes to Twitter clients – when are you developers gonna realize that not everyone has 20/20 vision.

New message notification – I’m sorry but using a gray scaled dot down at the bottom of the post where it basically blends into the background is a useful way to let me know that I have new messages. As well wouldn’t it kinda make sense to remove that dot from messages once some new ones have been received?

The other thing that is an irritant is having the name of the person sending the message at the bottom. I really dislike having to first scan to the bottom of the message to find out who it is from and then reading the message. Would it really be that difficult to have it at the beginning of the message where it would flow more naturally?

There are a lot of things about TweetDeck that make it a nice Twitter client to use and I can see why it is popular, however they aren’t enough to outweigh the points I have mentioned.

Maybe next time.