As a daily Twitter user on the desktop, I pretty much live and breath TweetDeck. For years I’ve had a second monitor effectively dedicated to monitoring different Twitter searches, allowing me to stay on top of breaking news online.
When you run multiple search columns in TweetDeck, you see an endless stream of information scroll by and the goal isn’t to see it all, but it’s incredibly glanceable and when something takes your eye, you interact with it. Often times we’re waiting for tasks on our computer to complete and taking a quite look to a second or third display to monitor things you’re interested in, is a nice way to stay up to date.
TweetDeck has been through a number of changes over the years, but is now getting the biggest change yet, the transition to a paid product.
Today @TwitterSupport gave notice to all TweetDeck users that in 30 days – let’s call that August 3rd, 2023, users must be Verified to access it.
Being Twitter Verified is only possible for those that subscribe to Twitter Blue for A$13 per month. Twitter Blue provides a range of features like posting up to 25,000 character Tweets, Editing Tweets for up to 1hr, posting 1080p video up to 10 mins long, and more.
Perhaps the biggest feature of all is the ability to make money from Twitter by enabling fans to subscribe to your content and soon earn a cut of the revenue Twitter makes when advertising against your content.
If you’re already a Twitter Blue subscriber, having ongoing support for Tweetdeck feels like additional value from the dollars you already spend, but for those who’ve held off until now, and rely on TweetDeck, you have a serious decision to make.
For some, this may be the final motivation to bite the bullet and start paying to use Twitter, or it could have the opposite effect where it has users looking for alternatives.
This week, Twitter deprecated v1 APIs which TweetDeck was built upon, so I, like many others, experienced a broken TweetDeck, where the timeline and DMs worked, but all search columns and lists would not load.
Twitter says V1 APIs were being used to scrape content from the site, so are transitioning to the paid v2 APIs.
In Twitter Support’s post today, they confirmed that users are being transitioned the TweetDeck Beta, which has been around for a while, but certainly lacks some of the functionality, like support for teams, which Twitter says is coming soon.
On the upside, the new TweetDeck now supports full composer functionality, which means you can copy and paste images from the clipboard directly into the New Tweet area, speeding up workflows.
TweetDeck Preview also supports Spaces, Video docking, Polls, and more. For a while now, TweetDeck was a second-class citizen and did not get all the new features that the twitter.com website and mobile apps received, so its great to know it’s now going to be supported going forward.
Leave your thoughts in the comments, is this enough to get you to Twitter Blue, are you sticking with the web client and one search at a time?
