TweetDeck RIP

Twitter’s been an integral part of my social media existence for more than four years n0w, and owing to things like #lrnchat, I need to have good tools.  I’ve played around with a number, but TweetDeck swept my enthusiasm for quite a while.  And now it’s going, and I’m mad and sad.

To understand, you have to understand several things:

• When you’re across platforms, sometimes on my Mac, sometimes on my iPad, and sometimes on my iPhone, it’s a major benefit to have one tool that is across the platforms
• If you’re doing something like monitoring a conference backchannel over several days, you  have to have columns
• If you’re engaged in a 60 minute chat, you  have to have quick updates
• And if you have to log in some of the times you want to use it, you’ll be less likely to participate

TweetDeck met all of these. Barely, it was across platforms, but not well: TweetDeck on the iPad had degraded to pretty pathetic. It surprised me how it could be so good on the iPhone, and so bad on the iPad.  Of course, they haven’t updated the iPad version in forever.  I used to regularly harass them about it via tweets.

Twitter bought TweetDeck, which seemed like it could be a good thing, but it seemed to hamstring the teams, having them focus on the web version.  And now they’re getting rid of the apps completely.  That’s why I’m sad.

What’s worse, the reasons TweetDeck is supposedly going away is that they find that more and more people are using the Twitter app on iOS. Um, hello, the TweetDeck on the iPad is  broken!  Of  course  they aren’t using it! And columns on the iPhone just don’t make a lot of difference.  That’s why I’m mad, it’s not that it’s not in demand, they’ve killed it!

There had been no other cross-platform solution that meets all the needs above.  None.  HootSuite came close, but it didn’t update fast, last I checked. TweetBot was supposedly industrial strength, but it was only iOS.   And Twitter’s own solution doesn’t support columns.  There literally wasn’t an alternate.  Even TweetDeck on the web will ‘time out’ and you need to login again.  It’s a barrier to go into your password keeper, enter ID app password, navigate to entry, get twitter password, and go back and log in. Particularly when you’re dashing to join a chat.

It appears TweetBot now has a Mac solution, so I’ll be checking that out.  Fingers crossed.