A beta preview of the popular social networking tool gets road tested here. Some day all TweetDecks will be built this way.
TweetDeck Beta preview was released to the public on August 12, 2010, not through Android Market, but only through sign-up hereAndroid Whitelist. TweetDeck is arguably the most popular Twitter management client and before tackling the Android market, TweetDeck had clients for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, iPhone, and iPad.
I was cautiously optimistic upon learning about the Android Beta. I use TweetDeck for Windows and absolutely love it. I have also used it for the iPhone and have been significantly underwhelmed. I decided to give it a shot on Android though, just because there is a lack of Twitter clients for the Android, unlike on the iPhone.
I will first touch on some of the nice things about TweetDeck Beta. For starters, not only can you use TweetDeck for Twitter, but you can also integrate your Facebook, Google Buzz, and Foursquare accounts into it as well. This makes it a “one stop shop” to read all of your social networking updates. I like the fact that it puts everything in one feed. Tweets are colored grey and Facebook updates are colored blue. I’m not sure what color they code Buzz, and Foursquare posts, because I don’t use them. Also nice is that if you have multiple Twitter accounts, you can set them all up as well, only one Facebook account though. The interface is visually appealing. It’s very easy to read, clear and large text. It allows for posting the same thing to one, multiple, or all of your social networking accounts simultaneously. Support for pictures and location are included in the update options as well. All of the normal twitter actions, such as retweet, reply, and direct message are all supported, as well as commenting and liking for Facebook posts. This client also has notifications, which I find to be great for replies and direct messages, but annoying and battery-consuming for general tweets and status updates.
I feel bad pointing out flaws in a beta release, it is beta after all, but I will go ahead and highlight some things that I hope are fixed with a full release. As I noted above, a nice thing about this client is its integration of all feeds in to one feed. For some people, that is very convenient and time saving. However, there doesn’t seem to be any way to separate the feeds into their own separate columns. I’m sure there will be people who prefer this, and expect it, considering all the TweetDeck releases on other platforms do it. Another improvement I would like to see is in the picture uploading for Facebook. Right now, TweetDeck handles pictures on Facebook the same way it does for Twitter, by uploading it to yfrog and providing a link. I would like to see them actually upload photos to Facebook like most of the other social networking clients do.
I think TweetDeck beta provides some true promise for the future of social network management on Android devices. The app seems to be coded very well for performance, and appears to fill a large void in the market for these types of apps. Go try it out for yourself. Happy Tweeting!
Craig is contributor for iPhone repair techs at iFixyouri. If you have an opinion or take on a subject, product, or service that you think TG Daily readers would find interested, drop me a line at [email protected].
