Two Alternatives for TweetDeck (RIP) That Will Tame Twitter
The nation mourned in unison this week as Twitter announced the end of TweetDeck’s long-neglected Android, iOS, and Adobe AIR Desktop versions of the platform. Going forward, users will have to make due with the browser or Google Chrome app versions. For many, there won’t be a difference. The mobile apps were generally useless to begin with and the Adobe AIR app, while having some features lacking in the newer versions, was a buggy, unstable, resource hog.
If you are looking for an alternative to TweetDeck that is as close to it as possible, PC Magazine has a few suggestions. Personally though, I’ve never been the biggest fan.
The regular Twitter feed is bad enough (an unorganized rapid fire jumbling of tweets from newspapers, TMZ, and Diddy makes my brain hurt.) I used TweetDeck to organize lists of users (New York news, Los Angeles news, etc.) so that the tweets would be more manageable. Still, one fact remains: it's a bunch of rapid fire, short text lists. We can do better.
Is this perhaps one of the greatest apps of all time? It takes RSS feeds, Twitter accounts, Twitter lists, or partnered blogs (including some of my favorites - Endgaget and Gizomodo), pulls the posts or tweets, and puts them in a clean, magazine-like format for reading on a tablet or smartphone. If the tweets have links, it will pull the stories from the links and turn those into stories as well. Instead of 300 tweets, each with links, you have 300 stories that you can read, flip past quickly, or glance at the title and blurb.
Reading anything is better on Flipboard, but tweets especially. The app also has "share" functionality, so you can retweet, email or share to other social media services.
BufferApp
If Flipboard is for incoming tweets, BufferApp is for outgoing tweets. We wrote a love sonnet to the brilliant Twitter tweeter earlier this year, so we won't belabor the point, but the short version is this: it takes all of your TBTs (To Be Tweets) and sends them out at a predetermined schedule. You fill the buffer. It auto-tweets.
We've also recently discovered the mobile apps, which make quickly checking your tweet analytics (how many clicks, how many retweets, etc.) and rearranging the TBTs in your buffer absolutely easy.
While you might be resistant to using two apps where one once did the trick, note that both of the above apps are capable of more than Twitter. Flipboard reads everything, from the New York Times to ESPN's GrantLand. BufferApp buffers updates for multiple social networks, including Facebook and LinkedIn. It can also manage multiple accounts on one service.
Are you suffering from TweetDeck withdraw? What's been your cure? Please, tweet us your solution, as we all grieve together.
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