TweetDeck, the social media dashboard feature on social giant Twitter, is all set for a revamp, as per an announcement made by the company. The news was first made public through a post on Twitter’s official account, which claimed that new avatar of the service, which might soon turn into a subscription-only feature, will allow users to incorporate “more of what they see on Twitter.”
Following this, there came a deeper insight into the update by Product Lead Keyvon Beykpour, who said, “We’re testing new features in TweetDeck for a small group in the U.S., Canada and Australia. These include a full Tweet Composer, new advanced search features, new column types, and a new way to group columns into clean workspaces.”
This comes after Beykpour had said earlier this year that TwitterDeck would soon be going for what he called a “pretty big overhaul from the ground up.”
As per information obtained by TechCrunch, the so-called “Tweet Composer” will now come equipped with the ability to add polls, GIFs, and emoji to all tweets, including scheduled tweets. This would be a major step away from the previous composer, which allowed only for photos and videos.
And that’s not all, since new column options, including Profile, Topics, Explore, Events, Moments, and even Bookmarks will be added to the deck. Moreover, it is now possible to choose between viewing the latest tweets or the top tweets under every column. However, most of the previous column types, like Activity, Followers, Likes, and Outbox, have been done away with.
The Search feature too, has further been bolstered, and will now let users use Boolean queries. Another, cooler addition which is on the way is “Decks,” a tool that will allow one to create separate workspaces by stacking different sets of columns. This could make it possible to segregate different interests or themes, or even keep tabs of posts and tweets made by different sets of people.
The new features have currently been made available to a select number of users, and it might be of concern that many responses aren’t too great. The removal of the “Activity” column seems to be annoying to many users, as now, they don’t have a way to get notified whenever anyone they follow on Twitter follows someone else or favorites a Tweet.
Other things that are not sitting well with the testers include the absence of the messages column, the fact that the Timeline now defaults to top tweets instead of latest tweets, and the removal of collections. One user has summed all the issues up into a single line, saying, “[This] isn’t a new TweetDeck, it’s a multi-column Twitter.”
In fact, a post by TweetDeck itself is actually working to scare many, as the look of Twitter seems to have been changed completely, with a huge photo image, and columns that are too wide. At the same time, though, it might not be the real picture, after all, as another post by Eric Zuckerman, an employee at Twitter news partnerships department, shows off a Twitter that’s much closer to home, with smaller images and tighter columns.
Meanwhile, Angelo Tomasco, an engineer at the firm, has shared his own views on the revamp, saying that the same is more about “developing an infrastructure that will bring health and safety updates”, than about making TweetDeck resemble the Twitter that we know. He further added that the design is such as to allow developers to gets their hands off “playing catch-up with Twitter,” so that they can build better features that are actually worthwhile.
It will be a while until we get to see just how this “overhaul” will fare, when it comes to Twitter’s attempts towards making its platform (or at least parts of it) into a subscription product, so that it can finally lay off having to rely on advertisements for a big chunk of its revenue.
