8 ms·

Twitter kills TweetDeck for Windows, automates log-ins for TweetDeck users

80 points by protomyth 11y ago

Mithaldu 11y ago
> The company said it made the decision to abandon development on Windows so it could “better focus on enhancing your TweetDeck experience,” Haha, what a bald-faced lie. They absolutely murdered tweetdeck by buying it a few years ago and releasing a "remade" version with 90% of the features removed. Officially abandoning the desktop client just means they've finally finished what they began and taken the old guy behind the shed.
- mchahn 11y ago
  > Officially abandoning the desktop client just means they've finally finished what they began and taken the old guy behind the shed. Do you think they are really abandoning it for all platforms? I was thinking how different the world was that the Mac is given more attention than Windows now. I remember many years when the opposite was true.
  - smitherfield 11y ago
    Probably because they can share most of the codebase between Mac and iOS.
    - wesbos 11y ago
      It's built in html/CSS/js
  - kyriakos 11y ago
    It's just a chromium packaged website really. Hardly any extra development required
  - kyriakos 11y ago
    It's just a chromium packaged website really. Hardly any extra development required
- Aleman360 11y ago
  They just released a UWP client for Windows 10.
  - Mithaldu 11y ago
    If you're talking about Tweeten, which is just a mini web browser showing a specialized part of their website, then you fell right for their marketing schemes.
    - Aleman360 11y ago
      Seems to be an official client: http://m.windowscentral.com/twitter-windows-10-pcs-and-tablets-gets-its-own-dark-theme http://m.windowscentral.com/twitter-windows-10-pcs-and-table...
      - Mithaldu 11y ago
        We were talking about Tweetdeck, if you change the context of the conversation, it's polite to actually mention that. As for that "client", it's just twitter. And it's just Twitter in a mini web browser. It's not tweetdeck. It's literally only useful for people who for some reason can't go to the actual website. It offers no extra features.
- ascagnel_ 11y ago
  TweetDeck was (is?) built on Adobe Air, which had the unique position of delivering the awful Flash experience on every OS without anything resembling a native widget set.
  - Mithaldu 11y ago
    The old tweetdeck desktop client was built on Air, but regardless of that it delivered features. The new tweetdeck by twitter was native windows and had no features.
whatnotests 11y ago
TweetDeck is useless. I honestly wonder what social media managers with, say, a dozen or more social media accounts (not just Twitter) actually use. My clueless googling revealed nothing.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  > TweetDeck is useless. It is now, but it wasn't always so. At some point it was simply the 'better twitter ui'.
  - alblue 11y ago
    And that's why they had to kill it. Instead of investing the time and effort to make the real UI better, their plan was simply to make other clients worse until everyone was forced back onto one giant web platform that they can monetise with adverts.
    - athenot 11y ago
      Unfortunately, it looks a lot like Facebook's playbook.
- mattzito 11y ago
  Hootsuite or Sproutsocial
- BinaryIdiot 11y ago
  > I honestly wonder what social media managers with, say, a dozen or more social media accounts (not just Twitter) actually use. I've wondered this as well and I've come to the horrible conclusion that many do it manually. Which is a real shame. Listening to people who do a TON of social media stuff (like Gary Vee) all seem to say they just log in and out of accounts constantly. LastPass probably makes this easier but that's still gotta be a pain. Edit: I had no idea about Hootsuite, etc. Hmm. Maybe the doing it manually that I heard about was limited to SnapChat?
  - 11y ago
jacquesm 11y ago
I don't think there has been a week since the beginning of the year when Twitter did not make some kind of move that was either hostile to users or developers. I really can't follow their strategy any more.
- wslh 11y ago
  I don't see any strategy, I see fear. I feel sorry for the developers relationship guy who tried to defend Twitter in HN yesterday and was lost in action immediately. I haven't seen anything like that for a company like Twitter. They don't know how to play the game of the big leagues. I think it will be better to them to close their API and show their real face instead of being ambiguous.
  - x5n1 11y ago
    Twitter has been always horrible for developers. Makes no sense. If I were doing a service like Twitter I would make firehose available to everyone. It's more important to dominate than control.
    - ThomPete 11y ago
      Not if you have to live off advertising.
      - x5n1 11y ago
        Force the users of the feeds to put your advertising in their feeds.
        ThomPete 11y ago
        As far as I remember the reason why Twitter originally scaled back access to their APIs was that 70% of their traffic happened outside of the twitter client. The second you allow the feed to be presented outside their control they loose any ability to control how people deal with it. It would be easy for a developer to remove the advertising in the feeds.
bachmeier 11y ago
TweetDeck is honestly the only way I've found to make Twitter usable. Twitter the idea is great. Twitter the company is so bad that its existence makes me question how capitalism has survived as long as it has.
- eli 11y ago
  Twitter ads work pretty well
- bradgessler 11y ago
  Check out http://tapbots.com/tweetbot/ http://tapbots.com/tweetbot/, but don't tell Twitter about them so they don't get acquired and shut down.
  - joshontheweb 11y ago
    I really wanted to like tweetbot but it beachballs allllll the time. It's a shame because twitter really screwed up their new version of twitter for mac. I'm left without a usable twitter client atm :/
    - taurath 11y ago
      You'd think their team of 2500 engineers could release a working app or two.
    - bradgessler 11y ago
      I haven't run into that. Did you try getting a hold of their support?
- JanneVee 11y ago
  > Twitter the company is so bad that its existence makes me question how capitalism has survived as long as it has. It is not capitalism that is the problem in this case. There is a fair amount of inertia involved but sooner or later it will correct itself. Looking at the stock price it is happening. Now there are other things in capitalism that could be considered problems but twitters survival isn't one of them. Edit: First time I'm hit with downvotes here on HN without arguments why I'm wrong. Fascinating...
jackfoxy 11y ago
Now seriously considering abandoning Twitter, which is a real shame. It's the primary communications channel for the world-wide F# community. I guess I have until April 15 to decide. And just after I'd finally cleaned-up my timeline feed by judicious use of mute.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
colemickens 11y ago
And replies are still broken. When you reply to a tweet in TweetDeck, it prepends the new tweet with your handle. Which makes absolutely no sense. Users have been reporting it for over a month and they just don't care to do anything about it.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
partiallypro 11y ago
IF they started rolling out TweetDeck features to the official Twitter app on Windows 10, I would find this excusable...but given @Jack's mishandling of virtually ever aspect of Twitter since his return...I have a feeling this is an on going symptom of a much broader problem Twitter has. I think Twitter is a very useful tool, but seriously someone like Microsoft or Google need to buy it and kick out all of the top management to the curb. I have rarely, if ever, seen a major company being so poorly ran in such a public fashion.
- nier 11y ago
  What about Apple? Wouldn’t Twitter be a perfect replacement for Apple Music’s Connect feature?
  - partiallypro 11y ago
    I just don't view Apple as an information company like I do Google and Microsoft. Don't feel it mixes all that well with their other verticals. Twitter is a perfect search engine companion.
incepted 11y ago
Just when you think "Ok, Twitter has gone pretty low but I'm pretty sure they can't anger their users any more"... they do.
lotsoflumens 11y ago
I found TweetDeck a few years ago and I gave it a permanent place in the top left corner of my desktop on my browsing machine immediately. It solved all the problems I was having with the web app - huge memory usage mainly. If there's no alternative on Windows, then I guess I'm going to get a lot more work done.
joseacta 11y ago
They just updated their UWP app for Windows 10 this week and added a bunch of features. It makes no sense to support two different apps on the same platform. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/apps/twitter/9wzdncrfj140 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/apps/twitter/9wzdncrfj... Good to see they're focusing efforts on Windows 10.

80 points by protomyth 11y ago

> The company said it made the decision to abandon development on Windows so it could “better focus on enhancing your TweetDeck experience,” Haha, what a bald-faced lie. They absolutely murdered tweetdeck by buying it a few years ago and releasing a "remade" version with 90% of the features removed. Officially abandoning the desktop client just means they've finally finished what they began and taken the old guy behind the shed.

mchahn 11y ago
> Officially abandoning the desktop client just means they've finally finished what they began and taken the old guy behind the shed. Do you think they are really abandoning it for all platforms? I was thinking how different the world was that the Mac is given more attention than Windows now. I remember many years when the opposite was true.
- smitherfield 11y ago
  Probably because they can share most of the codebase between Mac and iOS.
  - wesbos 11y ago
    It's built in html/CSS/js
- kyriakos 11y ago
  It's just a chromium packaged website really. Hardly any extra development required
- kyriakos 11y ago
  It's just a chromium packaged website really. Hardly any extra development required
Aleman360 11y ago
They just released a UWP client for Windows 10.
- Mithaldu 11y ago
  If you're talking about Tweeten, which is just a mini web browser showing a specialized part of their website, then you fell right for their marketing schemes.
  - Aleman360 11y ago
    Seems to be an official client: http://m.windowscentral.com/twitter-windows-10-pcs-and-tablets-gets-its-own-dark-theme http://m.windowscentral.com/twitter-windows-10-pcs-and-table...
    - Mithaldu 11y ago
      We were talking about Tweetdeck, if you change the context of the conversation, it's polite to actually mention that. As for that "client", it's just twitter. And it's just Twitter in a mini web browser. It's not tweetdeck. It's literally only useful for people who for some reason can't go to the actual website. It offers no extra features.
ascagnel_ 11y ago
TweetDeck was (is?) built on Adobe Air, which had the unique position of delivering the awful Flash experience on every OS without anything resembling a native widget set.
- Mithaldu 11y ago
  The old tweetdeck desktop client was built on Air, but regardless of that it delivered features. The new tweetdeck by twitter was native windows and had no features.

whatnotests 11y ago

TweetDeck is useless. I honestly wonder what social media managers with, say, a dozen or more social media accounts (not just Twitter) actually use. My clueless googling revealed nothing.

jacquesm 11y ago
> TweetDeck is useless. It is now, but it wasn't always so. At some point it was simply the 'better twitter ui'.
- alblue 11y ago
  And that's why they had to kill it. Instead of investing the time and effort to make the real UI better, their plan was simply to make other clients worse until everyone was forced back onto one giant web platform that they can monetise with adverts.
  - athenot 11y ago
    Unfortunately, it looks a lot like Facebook's playbook.
mattzito 11y ago
Hootsuite or Sproutsocial
BinaryIdiot 11y ago
> I honestly wonder what social media managers with, say, a dozen or more social media accounts (not just Twitter) actually use. I've wondered this as well and I've come to the horrible conclusion that many do it manually. Which is a real shame. Listening to people who do a TON of social media stuff (like Gary Vee) all seem to say they just log in and out of accounts constantly. LastPass probably makes this easier but that's still gotta be a pain. Edit: I had no idea about Hootsuite, etc. Hmm. Maybe the doing it manually that I heard about was limited to SnapChat?
- 11y ago

jacquesm 11y ago

I don't think there has been a week since the beginning of the year when Twitter did not make some kind of move that was either hostile to users or developers. I really can't follow their strategy any more.

wslh 11y ago
I don't see any strategy, I see fear. I feel sorry for the developers relationship guy who tried to defend Twitter in HN yesterday and was lost in action immediately. I haven't seen anything like that for a company like Twitter. They don't know how to play the game of the big leagues. I think it will be better to them to close their API and show their real face instead of being ambiguous.
- x5n1 11y ago
  Twitter has been always horrible for developers. Makes no sense. If I were doing a service like Twitter I would make firehose available to everyone. It's more important to dominate than control.
  - ThomPete 11y ago
    Not if you have to live off advertising.
    - x5n1 11y ago
      Force the users of the feeds to put your advertising in their feeds.
      - ThomPete 11y ago
        As far as I remember the reason why Twitter originally scaled back access to their APIs was that 70% of their traffic happened outside of the twitter client. The second you allow the feed to be presented outside their control they loose any ability to control how people deal with it. It would be easy for a developer to remove the advertising in the feeds.

bachmeier 11y ago

TweetDeck is honestly the only way I've found to make Twitter usable. Twitter the idea is great. Twitter the company is so bad that its existence makes me question how capitalism has survived as long as it has.

eli 11y ago
Twitter ads work pretty well
bradgessler 11y ago
Check out http://tapbots.com/tweetbot/ http://tapbots.com/tweetbot/, but don't tell Twitter about them so they don't get acquired and shut down.
- joshontheweb 11y ago
  I really wanted to like tweetbot but it beachballs allllll the time. It's a shame because twitter really screwed up their new version of twitter for mac. I'm left without a usable twitter client atm :/
  - taurath 11y ago
    You'd think their team of 2500 engineers could release a working app or two.
  - bradgessler 11y ago
    I haven't run into that. Did you try getting a hold of their support?
JanneVee 11y ago
> Twitter the company is so bad that its existence makes me question how capitalism has survived as long as it has. It is not capitalism that is the problem in this case. There is a fair amount of inertia involved but sooner or later it will correct itself. Looking at the stock price it is happening. Now there are other things in capitalism that could be considered problems but twitters survival isn't one of them. Edit: First time I'm hit with downvotes here on HN without arguments why I'm wrong. Fascinating...

jackfoxy 11y ago

Now seriously considering abandoning Twitter, which is a real shame. It's the primary communications channel for the world-wide F# community. I guess I have until April 15 to decide. And just after I'd finally cleaned-up my timeline feed by judicious use of mute.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

colemickens 11y ago

And replies are still broken. When you reply to a tweet in TweetDeck, it prepends the new tweet with your handle. Which makes absolutely no sense. Users have been reporting it for over a month and they just don't care to do anything about it.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

partiallypro 11y ago

IF they started rolling out TweetDeck features to the official Twitter app on Windows 10, I would find this excusable...but given @Jack's mishandling of virtually ever aspect of Twitter since his return...I have a feeling this is an on going symptom of a much broader problem Twitter has. I think Twitter is a very useful tool, but seriously someone like Microsoft or Google need to buy it and kick out all of the top management to the curb. I have rarely, if ever, seen a major company being so poorly ran in such a public fashion.

nier 11y ago
What about Apple? Wouldn’t Twitter be a perfect replacement for Apple Music’s Connect feature?
- partiallypro 11y ago
  I just don't view Apple as an information company like I do Google and Microsoft. Don't feel it mixes all that well with their other verticals. Twitter is a perfect search engine companion.

incepted 11y ago

Just when you think "Ok, Twitter has gone pretty low but I'm pretty sure they can't anger their users any more"... they do.

lotsoflumens 11y ago

I found TweetDeck a few years ago and I gave it a permanent place in the top left corner of my desktop on my browsing machine immediately. It solved all the problems I was having with the web app - huge memory usage mainly. If there's no alternative on Windows, then I guess I'm going to get a lot more work done.

joseacta 11y ago

They just updated their UWP app for Windows 10 this week and added a bunch of features. It makes no sense to support two different apps on the same platform. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/apps/twitter/9wzdncrfj140 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/apps/twitter/9wzdncrfj... Good to see they're focusing efforts on Windows 10.