Update
Tweetdeck is now back, however, Twitter has not provided any detail on the outage. Given the significant outage in the service, that indicates the level of commitment they have for power users.
TweetDeck is not available right now. For the past few hours, users of Twitter’s multi-column Twitter interface on the web have not been able to access the service.
When visiting https://tweetdeck.twitter.com users are shown the login page. When you login, the authentication works successfully, but then redirects users to Twitter’s web version of the site (single column).
A quick check of Twitter’s status page and everything is reported to be normal or ‘All Systems Operational’.. and a quick check of the @TweetDeck twitter account and there’s no mention of any changes.
From the very early days of joining Twitter, like many, I gravitated towards TweetDeck (originally a 3rd party product, later acquired by Twitter). The service allows you to monitor multiple search terms, hashtags, tweets from a list of users or tweets from specific accounts. It’s amazingly useful and often gets an entire monitor dedicated to keep pulse with what’s happening the tech industry, as well as the local, national and global news.
By comparison, Twitter’s website is incredibly limited in its feature set. There are 3rd party paid solutions like Hootsuite, but TweetDeck was a long time favourite.
With an outage now lasting a number of hours and no communication from Twitter, I fear this may be the end of TweetDeck.
In terms of the question.. is Twitter killing TweetDeck, we don’t have official confirmation, but the writing seems to be on the wall. There has been little to no investment in the product, with features like Polls and even GIF support only arriving months after they hit the web version of Twitter. This was a strong sign developer efforts were going into the Pro interface of TweetDeck.
If this is the end, it’ll be a sad day.
Don’t be so dramatic.
I really hope I’m wrong. The company continues to show very little developer effort for TweetDeck, which makes me concerned for its future. Maybe it comes back later today, maybe it doesn’t. Either way, I wouldn’t be surprised to get official confirmation they’re killing it off. I’m sure they have metrics that suggest a tiny % of power users are using it, but to those people, it’s an important product to keep people on the platform.