So Long, TweetDeck Mobile. We Hardly Knew Ye
If you tweet to promote your practice -- or just because you like to tweet -- you've probably heard the sad news that the TweetDeck app is dead. This week, Twitter-owned app announced:
To continue to offer a great product that addresses your unique needs, we're going to focus our development efforts on our modern, web-based versions of TweetDeck. To that end, we are discontinuing support for our older apps: TweetDeck AIR, TweetDeck for Android and TweetDeck for iPhone. They will be removed from their respective app stores in early May and will stop functioning shortly thereafter. We'll also discontinue support for our Facebook integration.
The outpouring of emotion across the Internet suggests that active tweeters aren't handling the news well. (The Atlantic Wire even published a eulogy for the TweetDeck app.) Luckily, all is not lost. TweetDeck will live on in actual computers.
For those of you who aren’t active tweeters, a little background information…
TweetDeck is/was a dashboard that allowed users to manage multiple social media platforms. Some people liked to use it to schedule tweets. Others like to use it to manage what they viewed through social media. Twitter purchased TweetDeck for $40 million in 2011 from Iain Dodsworth, the UK-developer who built the app.
Unlike some products that are eventually phased out, TweetDeck was actually incredibly popular. So why would Twitter kill a popular app? Well, PCMag explains, it’s an attempt to make more money. The magazine’s former editor-in-chief, Lance Ulanoff, wrote “If the majority of Twitter users view their tweets through third-party tools that simply make calls to Twitter’s [application programming interface] API’s, they’ll never see Twitter partner ads, promos, or Quickbars. Twitter loses control not only of the conversation, but the ability to monetize millions and millions of eyeballs and social activity.”
The good news, however, is that those who use TweetDeck on non-mobile devices will actually be getting a new and improved TweetDeck. S.E. Smith told xoJane.com readers yesterday that everyone needs to chill because TweetDeck 2.0 is on the way. According to Smith, “What’s really going to happen is that Twitter is going to drop support for the deprecated AIR desktop version, rolling out TweetDeck 2.0, which restores a lot of the functionality people loved about the old desktop version.”
Mobile app users, however, will either have to turn to the traditional Twitter app, or find a TweetDeck alternative.
Related Resources:
- 10 Tweets of Advice: Social Media Lawyer Marketing (FindLaw’s Strategist)
- FTC Settles Twitter Privacy Charges (FindLaw’s Technologist)
- Twitter Defamation: Can Your Business Sue? (FindLaw’s Free Enterprise)