| I was delighted to learn that TweetDeck 0.26 became available this evening and quickly upgraded TweetDeck on my MacBook Pro and installed the newly available iPhone version. I have long been wishing for TweetDeck on the iPhone and, so far, I am thrilled with the implementation. The TweetDeck team did a great job translating the TweetDeck client UI experience to the iPhone. Highlights - iPhone Support—TweetDeck for the iPhone is now available as a free download in the iTunes store.
- TweetDeck Account/Synchronization—This defines an account that automatically backs up your TweetDeck settings to a web service, allowing you to synchronize TweetDeck instances running on different machines. For example, I can now sync TweetDeck on my Windows machines and Tweet Deck on my iPhone with my "master" TweetDeck on my MacBook Pro.
- Multiple Twitter Accounts—Just as the previous version could post to your Twitter account and/or your Facebook account, TweetDeck 0.26 lets you define multiple Twitter accounts and makes it very easy to specify which account(s) to post to. Thus, you can easily manage multiple Twitter "personas" from the TweetDeck UI.
- Reply All—This new command lets you easily reply to all people referenced in a tweet.
- Block—This new command lets you quickly block a user.
- Block & Report Spam—This command lets you block a user and report the user as spam all in one operation.
- Reference To—This command adds to a new tweet a shortened URL that references an existing tweet.
(Note: I've not done an exhaustive review; if I've missed something new, please post a comment and I'll update this post.) Wish List While I love the new version, there are a couple hot button features I would still like to see added in the next version: - bit.ly Credentials—I'd like TweetDeck to use my bit.ly account credentials when shortening URLs. This would make it easier to track usage statistics on those URLs within the bit.ly account dashboard.
- TweetPhoto Support—Currently TweetDeck offers a choice of TwitPic or YFrog for picture publishing. I'd prefer to use the TweetPhoto service.
Bug While installing the iPhone application, I ran across what appears to be a bug in the new TweetDeck Account feature on the iPhone. After several attempts, I could not get the iPhone client to accept a TweetDeck Account name based on the myst-technology.com domain name. TweetDeck kept insisting that the account name contained an invalid character. Eventually, I tried using domain names without a dash character and those worked. This is a nuisance bug that was easy to work around. Conclusion With cross-machine synchronization and multi-account support, TweetDeck has become an industrial strength Twitter client with features needed by power users. At the same time, the clean, intuitive UI makes it an ideal client for casual or beginner Twitter users. Congratulations, Twitter team! |