I’m pretty sure I wrote the first review of TweetDeck
It’s late, and I’m roto-rootering my Gmail inbox, archiving, deleting, getting it nice and clean when I came upon a forgotten little tidbit. In early July, 2008 I saw a random tweet about a new Twitter application that streamlined the process of viewing multiple columns of information at one time. No Twitter app had done anything like this before, in fact there were only a handful of apps out there, including Twhirl.
I shot an email to their catch-all account, hoping to test the application out, it was TweetDeck. Turns out that Iain Dodsworth, TweetDeck’s founder, was literally the sole developer at the time. He gladly hooked me up with a download link, and we got to chatting a bit more in email. Adam Ostrow had tweeted that Mashable was looking for freelance writers, and I thought this the perfect opportunity to send something in. It was never actually published, but I figured for fun I’d post it here before deleting the email forever, along with a screenshot of TweetDeck version 0.14b.
And honestly, there’s a very good chance I was not the first person to ever really review TweetDeck. If you have a link to an earlier review, leave it in the comments, I’d love to see it!
Enjoy:
Create groups, search, offline tweeting and more on Twitter with TweetDeck
Currently in private beta, Adobe AIR application TweetDeck aims to break down your Twitter feed into a more manageable and efficient interface. Sole developer Iain Dodsworth has answered many a Twitter users’ prayers for the ability to group the people you follow into different categories. Generating a list is simple, simply click the “Group” button, name the group, check off the people you’d like to add and you’re good to go. It is unbelievable how much easier it is to track all of my followers when I can break them down into “Friends”, “Coworkers”, “Bots” and more.
The search feature is definitely lacking at this time, only allowing for a simple string of words in which it then searches through your downloaded tweets. A slider at the bottom of the application bears the label “Timeframe” and allows you to display tweets anywhere between 1 hour ago up until 168 hours.
Quite possibly the most surprising feature of TweetDeck relies on its use of a local database to store incoming and outgoing tweets. What does this mean exactly? Well if you’re traveling with your computer and not connected to the Internet, you can tweet away and TweetDeck will post your tweets the next time you’re online. Since the application also stores tweets from your friends, searching is instantaneous.
Keeping in mind the short development to market time of TweetDeck and its current beta status, I will accept the shortcomings it presents.The user interface leaves some things to be desired; you should be able to drag lists to the left or right of each other, and you have to do a lot of scrolling when the app is not full screened. Also because of the Twitter imposed rate limiting, TweetDeck will only download your last 20 tweets from the time you first open it. Dodsworth did make it clear that he’s been compiling a list of bugs and feature requests from private beta testers and will be addressing all of the issues in future releases. Mashable readers can download private beta of TweetDeck here.
