TweetDeck – My Wishlist

I spent a lot of time searching for a Twitter app whose features and UI gave me the best Twitter experience. As a result, for the better part of two years I’ve stuck with TweetDeck as my primary way of interacting with the service. As much as I like it, I do wish it had a few changes that would make the experience even better.

Desktop

Bookmarks – I think the most annoying non-feature of most Twitter UIs is that they make you search out where you left off. You fire up the app and it starts you at the most recent tweets. It’s then up to you to remember when you last logged in or what tweet was the last one you saw. There’s an easy way out of this: bookmarks.

These would be placeholders for every column in TweetDeck (feed, search, list, etc.) that remembers the timestamp of the last visible area. You could then hit a button to be zipped straight to that place. These bookmarks should also be copied to the cloud so that people logged into the TweetDeck site (as most are) can sync these bookmarks across a user’s platforms: desktop, laptop, phone, and so forth.

Column Refresh – How many of us have done a search only to see it rarely or never update? You press the “Refresh” button, but it seems to be no more effective than that mystery light switch in your house that doesn’t seem to be attached to anything. Either have a refresh button for every column or, alternatively, have the refresh button work for the currently active column.

Mobile App

(Disclosure: because of these issues with the mobile app, I reluctantly abandoned the TweetDeck app in favor of Twitter’s. But I would happily change back.)

Autostart on Reboot or App Update – Perhaps the most annoying aspect of Mobile Tweetdeck (I use the one for Android) is that there is no option to keep the app “always on” through reboots or updates of the app. Related to this…

Reliable Background Column Updating – Despite the column settings, I’ve found TweetDeck’s columns will often have large gaps where nothing was downloaded when the phone was sleeping. This is important because of Twitter’s API limits. You can easily miss some tweets even with the app running. If you Quit the app, when you start it again (without having the option of bookmarks) reloading the columns and finding your place becomes a bit of a chore.

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I don’t think these suggestions are particularly onerous to program or unreasonable to request. The cross-platform bookmark feature alone would be a godsend from my point of view and help TweetDeck stand out from the crowd. As I said, I’ve tried most of the apps out there and while many have much to recommend them, the fact is that I find TweetDeck to be the one that lets me use Twitter most effectively and efficiently. It’s not perfect, but it could get a little closer. Closer would be good.