In this post Kim Woodbridge from (Anti) Social Development reviews popular Twitter Client – TweetDeck. Follow Kim on Twitter @kwbridge
Tweetdeck is an Adobe Air desktop application used to access Twitter. Tweetdeck is available for the Windows and MAC operating systems. It is made of panes that allow you to take the enormous amount of information contained within Twitter and break it down into parts that are more easily managed.
Default Panes:
- All Tweets – All the people that you are following.
- Replies – All @ messages sent to your username
- Direct Messages – All personal d messages sent to your username
More panes can be added by using Tweetdeck’s features, such as Groups, and can be rearranged by moving them to the left or the right.
Integrated Features:
Search – The search used by Tweetdeck is http://search.twitter.com Followers or all twitter users can be searched and the results open up in a new pane. I frequently run a search on WordPress to discover new resources, help individuals who are having problems, and locate work.
Twitscoop – Twitscoop reports the hot trends on Twitter in a tag cloud format and also lists the top 10 keywords. While writing this some of the top tags are iowa penn, quaker oatmeal (I have no idea what that’s about), and nzelection.
12 Seconds – 12 Seconds is an online service for video status updates. It currently can only be searched by username. As it is still in private beta, it is not particularly useful for the majority of Twitter users.
Groups – Groups allows you to organize your followers into managable chunks. This feature is what makes Tweetdeck outshine other Twitter applications. Once you get above 300 individuals in your network it is difficult to keep up with the rapid flow of information.
I currently have three groups; Network, Soccer and Philly. Network includes those who I’ve worked with, had extensive discussions with and those that I want to learn from. Coincidentally, when I took the screenshot, Darren was feeling “easy like Sunday morning”. I am a Soccer/Football fan so this group contains other fans and soccer related news. I have to be very careful with this group when I miss a match and don’t want to know the score. Finally, I live in Philadelphia, PA so I have a Philly group that contains other people who live here and local news. Recently we had a discussion about the proposed city budget and what we could do to stop 11 branches of the library from being permanently closed.
Settings and Preferences – Tweetdeck contains a limited number of settings and preferences.
Refresh – Refresh is a manual update of tweets if you don’t want to wait for the application to update. Doing this too frequently can cause you to exceed the API limit.
Single Column View – This setting allows you to reduce the application to the leftmost pane. I use this to reduce the amount of space the application takes or if I just want to monitor replies to me.
Tweets/Alerts – This is used to set notifications and sounds.
Colors/Fonts – If you don’t like the default black and gray, you can change the color scheme. The application does not currently contain Themes so setting new colors takes some creativity.
Twitter API – This is an important setting. It allows you to set how much of the Twitter API is used for all messages, replies, and direct messages. If you are running Twitter into other programs, such as integrating your status with Facebook or displaying Tweets on your blog, you can easily exceed the rate limit and not get updates for some time. I had a problem with this because of a WordPress plugin I was using. I reduced my API usage to 30% total, uninstalled the plugin, and am slowly increasing my usage.
Issues
While the integrated features, especially Groups, make Tweetdeck an indispensable program for the power user it is not without it’s problems.
Memory Usage – I have had Tweetdeck open for 5 days and it is using over 600MB of memory. I have heard people report 1GB of usage. If you leave your computer and Tweetdeck running all of the time, you will have to restart it periodically.
Groups
1. If you accidentally close the group pane, you will lose that group and it is necessary to recreate it. Once you have a large network, scrolling through all of the users to recreate the group is tedious. This is more of an inconvenience but for some reason I closed one of my groups twice in the last week. This, however, may be a sign of my own incompetence.
2. Additionally, it is best to wait 24 hours of actively running Tweetdeck before creating a group. Why? Because people in your network will not show up in the list until they tweet. It generally takes 24 hours for everyone to say something at least once.
3. Something I only noticed recently is that all users show up in the list for creating a group even if you have unfollowed them. This is frustrating because it increases the number of users to scroll through when creating the group.
Size
Tweetdeck, even with only 3 panes open, is a big program. Even the author says that is best used on a second monitor.
Overall, Tweetdeck is one of the best 3rd party applications for for Twitter access and management. If you haven’t tried it already, give it a go and let me know it if worked out for you.
Looks pretty awesome, I’m still stuck on Twhirl but I’m going to download TweetDeck right now and give it a shot to see how I like it.
Appreciate the review, as always.
I have tried Tweetdeck in the past, but it cannot cope with multiple Twitter account, like Twhirl
Thanks for the review.
I find Tweetdeck useful, too. I wish that you could resize the columns more easily, though.
I do run it on a second monitor as suggested but it takes up far more space than necessary.
Another way to solve this would be to show alerts at the top of the screen every time you had a new DM or a search result. Then you would know to scroll over to look at those columns.
Thanks.
Tweetdeck is also available for Linux.
A great review, I have been using Tweetdeck for a couple of days now and I’m really enjoying using it.
i must say – tweetdeck is the best twitter client among all the others twittter clients for windows, from the very first day i liked the interface of tweetdeck with hell lot of things merged very smartly
And after reading this post i have come to know lot more which i had ignored in tweetdeck, thanks Darren
I like TweetDeck a lot and thanks to this review am getting more out of it already. Thanks.
I am curious about one thing. It seems to ignore my Tweets on occasion. Full disclosure– it is time to rebuild Windows so it may just be my machine, but I am curious if anyone else has noticed this…
I use TweetDeck also and recreating groups after accidentally closing a pane is the biggest issue I’ve had to deal with. Otherwise, I really like it.
Excellent post. I am testing TweetDeck today and like it. The real estate issue is the big problem. It would be outstanding for them to incorporate smaller fonts so we can shrink the footprint. I am 43 and can read the Twirl font fine if that helps the developers.
Kim, thank you for the thoughtful review!
I have used TweetDeck off and on, along with iTweet (a web app), and Twitteriffic for Mac. None of them have all the features I want, and I actually find myself going back and forth between them to do certain tasks. TweetDeck has groups and search, iTweet has ease of use and easy retweet, and Twitteriffic is great for when you have a lot of tweets to catch up on, like overnight.
Now if somebody could just roll these three into one killer app, I would be a happy guy!
I have been using TweetDeck for a few weeks now and really like it. Previously I was a Twhirl fan. With the separate pane’s it makes tracking conversations easy. Before TweekDeck I almost gave up on Twitter due to its UI but TweetDeck fixed all that.
I also wanted to point out that Adobe AIR has a beta for Linux. I’m running TweetDeck v0.20b right now on Ubuntu 8.10 with no problems. I haven’t left it running for 5+ days but after 3+ days I don’t have any memory leaks like Kim report of loosing 600MB. One of the pluses to running in Linux is I have a virtual workspace (desktop) dedicated just for TweetDeck.
I’ve been using TweetDeck for a while now. It is by far the best one I’ve tried because of the way it separates out replies and DMs.
Tweetdeck is so easy to use and keep on top of the twitter-stream, as well as break it down to managable chunks. My app of choice these days.
I used Tweetdeck for a few days. Beautiful design, and whilst I see the advantages for those who like to organise their groups and find out what’s hot (Tweetscoop), IMHO, it’s more complicated in set up and execution than I need. Yes, Tweetdeck’s footprint takes up too much screen real estate. I went back to Twhirl.
Personally, I like tweetdeck, but even on my brand new machine it hogs some ram for sure, so i use twhirl as an always open buddy, and tweetdeck when i really want to be active. It is hard to get away from the group features for me.
Great article,
Keith
I’ve been using tweetdeck and so far I like it but I don’t know how much longer I can put up with the one flaw – on my Vista machine, every link I click opens in IE instead of my default browser, Firefox. I’ve checked every setting, all my other apps open links in FF but TweetDeck just refuses to cooperate. I’ve been told it’s an adobe air issue but that doesn’t fix the problem.
One more reason to not like Vista, like I really needed yet another reason.
I found Tweetdeck to be a bit of a memory hog – especially for an my older laptop with 512K memory
I use TweetDeck and I think it’s great. I wish I had a second screen though. I would put TweetDeck on that second screen if I had one.
Been using TweetDeck for a little while and am very happy with the ease and power of the app.
Great tool for using Tweeter, best one I’ve run across so far.
I LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE TweetDeck. I use it on a second monitor and it rocks. About the default browser issue: if you change your default programs in Vista, uninstall and then reinstall TweetDeck, that might do it. I’m loathe to do this because of all the work I put into creating my groups.
Thanks, Michael. My default program in Vista has been Firefox since I got the computer last year. Nevertheless, I did try that as well as a few other things I’d read about. I stopped short of major registry edits. I tweaked the registry in Windows 98 many times but I’m not brave enough to mess with my vista registry. Maybe I should install it in my XP machine and keep it running next to me.
Thanks, Kim. Yup, TweetDeck is damn good, though I use it on and off with Twhirl or even AlertThingy (which links to my FF account), depending on other open apps at the time.
@Marisa – agree with you on the problem with opening links. Wish there was an easier way to atleast copy the url so I could dump it in the browser of my choice. I often have IE, FF, Opera and Safari running together.
Thanks to the people who mentioned that there is also a beta version for Linux. I didn’t know that and I’m glad it’s cross-platform. @Thomas Nicholson mentioned that he didn’t have the memory usage problem on Linux. I’m curious if anyone who uses it on a Mac notices a problem …? Also, if this only happens in Windows is this more of a Windows/Air problem than a Tweetdeck problem or an interaction between all three?
Also, a Tweetdeck update was released today bringing it to .20 beta. One of the best new features that I’ve noticed so far is a + sign next the the user’s avatar. This allows you to easily add that user to one of your groups.
Thanks for a great review! I have been using tweetdeck for a while now but I still found some interesting points that you made. For me it is a needed tool for the organization of my tweets and to help me join in on the conversations that help me in business. Follow me @stewartb2b
I recently go t this program,and I love it…found the link thru one of the post here. Decent program so that you don’t have to constantly log on into twitter.
I have started using Tweetdeck, but I notice that it doesn’t display the full 140 characters of tweets that I receive. I have to log into Twitter to see the full tweets. I can’t seem to find a setting or option that refers to this. Has anyone found a way around this? Thank you.
Great review. I think I will have to download this once I get home.
~ Kristi
yes~this tool definitly suits my purposes better~to chat nd to promote~thx for the insights
@denkisa
It doesn’t support Cyrillic.
Perhaps a functionality to send msgs only to certain groups will make TweetDeck an indispensable tool.
@hectorhenry17
Am going to try it out right know. thns you.-
@KasumiSEO
Just testing TweetDeck as I type…
As long as it runs happily in the background along side FireFox, Dreamweaver and Photoshop
@storyboardlife
thanks for the review. I was in the middle of install and got a little “scared” so I looked up google, “tweet deck review” and came up with your site. Thanks.
@pablothehat
I am still evaluating TweetDeck.
It looks good and performs very smoothly in a virtual environment, but it is a screen hog..ah the luxury of a second monitor!
I wish! LOL.
I still however, tend to use PeopleBrowser and Yoono more that TweetDeck, mainly because of Firefox integration.
I do not believe Tweetdeck is what uses up the mass amount of RAM, it’s Adobe Air that is using all the RAM, Adobe says mim req RAM is 1 g. Given when Java Runtime is on it sucks up over 400 mb of RAM. Being Air is a bigger program I sure the whole RAM issue is Adobe Air Runtime.
@JustJulie
Do you know where I can get some technical support for TD? As the Facebook integration went through yesterday, my TD crashed and has never come back to life. The application loads, I can send tweets from it, but the columns won’t load! It’s basically useless at this point.
@aurooba
I just recently started using TweetDeck, before that I used the Dashboard Twidget for a while when I wasn’t such an active Twitter user AT ALL, but now, I’ve been using it for about a week, and I love it! It’s a very easy tool to use, and it’s usefulness is apparent pretty quickly. It makes keeping track of what happens very easy, and it has it’s own Growl like notification system, which is quite nice! Great application, nice review =)
@OzAtheist
I like TweetDeck, but found it a huge memory hog, I’ve been using TweetVisor lately as it’s purely a web based interface. Advantages include less memory usage, and no need to install additioanl programs, so it can be used wherever you like. Tweetvisor still has a few problems, but is the closest I’ve found to a TweetDeck equivalent.
How about a review of TweetVisor?
@jtjn
thanks for the tweetvisor idea!
@Nathanyay
Tweetdeck is great, just compared this program to Mixero and was surprised how close Mixero resembled Tweetdeck. But still cant beat good ol’ TD, mixero makes a perfect backup though !