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The Twitter TweetDeck Failure

When I first started using Twitter, I was using it on a phone just via text messaging (I feel like an old guy saying “back in my day…” ).  As tweeting became more popular, more options surfaced for how to manage all the tweets.  Phones now had apps that made tweeting via text messaging look like using a DOS console vs. an elegant Windows UI.  The Twitter.com website improved dramatically.  Soon, I was tweeting either via the web or an app.

My first introduction to TweetDeck was on the PC, followed by the app for iPad.  I really liked the layout and how easy it was to keep track of searches, lists, and mentions.  It was the best app to manage tweets in my humble opinion.  So it was no surprise to me when I heard Twitter bought TweetDeck for millions of dollars.

I was excited for the product!  Now under the ownership of the Twitter, what cool features would await us?

And then came reality.

Who would of guessed that the product would go backwards.  I can only imagine how many of us that were using TweetDeck before the acquisition, scratched our heads wondering where the setting was to get to that cool feature we liked.  We didn’t accept that it was gone, we simply didn’t understand where they relocated it.  Because it was not fathomable that the feature would truly be gone!

On the day of writing this post, I had a need to add myself to a Twitter list I created.  I could not see how to do it via the web interface, so I looked to TweetDeck (the most recent release by Twitter) for a way to do it.  Big mistake.  Someone in the Twitter universe suggested I download to version of TweetDeck before Twitter took over.  Feeling dirty for installing an older version alongside the current version, I was able to accomplish my objective.  I had to use an older product.  That is a failure.  It makes no sense to me.

For any of you who have shared a similar story, I would love to hear about it.  Please leave a comment.  Let the search engines find all the woes and complaints.  May the minds behind the current release of TweetDeck reflect on the massive failure of giving their community less.

By the way, if you want that “golden” edition of TweetDeck before Twitter took over, you can download it by clicking the yellow TweetDeck logo above.  The blue logo is a dead end.