Twitter kills TweetDeck for Windows, automates log-ins for TweetDeck users | Hacker News Reader

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

techcrunch.com

80 pointsprotomyth47 comments

> 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.

> 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.

It's just a chromium packaged website really. Hardly any extra development required

Probably because they can share most of the codebase between Mac and iOS.

It's built in html/CSS/js

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.

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.

They just released a UWP client for Windows 10.

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.

Seems to be an official client: http://m.windowscentral.com/twitter-windows-10-pcs-and-table...

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.

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.

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.

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.

Not if you have to live off advertising.

I don't see why they have to live off advertising. Right now they're charging a ton of money for firehose access through Gnip. They could charge power users for access to cooler features and better analytics, or just charge developers gradually more money for more traffic instead of having a hard rate limit.

Yes, I don't understand that either. A power user of Twitter needs a suite of third-party apps and pays for them. Why not provide them for premium users? This makes Twitter officially pay-to-win, but it already is inofficially.

Features I use via third parties is mostly analytics. When to schedule tweets? Whom to follow/unfollow? Which accounts are fake/spam? Who favs/retweets me a lot? I would like to see some overlay in the UI which gives me stats about other users.

If I would have something to sell, then we enter the world of conversion tracking. Twitter should support A/B testing. The interface for teams managing a single account seems weak (haven't used that much).

Imho the core service of Twitter is to connect brands with people. It still does that job better than Facebook.

Social networks need to be free so they can gain as many users as possible and generate network effects. Anything but advertising messes with the incentives. https://stratechery.com/2014/ello-consumer-friendly-business...

Ello made things weird for new users. The stuff I'm talking about would only affect commercial users, or people who are already heavily invested in being on Twitter.

But is Twitter really a social network?

Force the users of the feeds to put your advertising in their feeds.

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.

Wat?

How about that week where they said they were sorry and things were gonna be different from here on out?

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.

Check out http://tapbots.com/tweetbot/, but don't tell Twitter about them so they don't get acquired and shut down.

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 :/

You'd think their team of 2500 engineers could release a working app or two.

I haven't run into that. Did you try getting a hold of their support?

Twitter ads work pretty well

> 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...

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.

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.

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.

What about Apple? Wouldn’t Twitter be a perfect replacement for Apple Music’s Connect feature?

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.

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/9wzdncrfj...

Good to see they're focusing efforts on Windows 10.

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.

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.

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.

> TweetDeck is useless.

It is now, but it wasn't always so. At some point it was simply the 'better twitter ui'.

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.

Unfortunately, it looks a lot like Facebook's playbook.

> 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?

Multiple users in Chrome seems to be a viable workaround. But I really miss the old Tweetdeck before the buyout even if it means I had to install Adobe Air...

Hootsuite or Sproutsocial

Many use HootSuite.

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