Tweetdeck – the Adobe Air application which has taken Twitter addicts to a new state of nirvana – is due to be updated this week, and UK-based developer Iain Dodswoth emailed me with the new version.
It will appear at v0.20 and is quite different from the previous one. Now, Tweets are no longer stored for long periods as they were before. Dodsworth says the reason is that the sheer volume of tweets (his TweetDeck was storing 10,000 per day) was having a huge impact on the speed and reliability of TweetDeck. Now when, you start up TweetDeck, it will initially be empty and then all the columns will be populated from the live API data within a second or two.
The advantages are myriad. The maximum number of tweets per Twitter call has been increased from 20 to 200 – theoretically you can now get 200 tweets every 36 seconds in your All Tweets column. Twitter searches have also been increased, from 20 tweets to the maximum of 100 tweets per minute. The startup of TweetDeck is much improved. Column actions such as adding, moving or deleting columns are much faster (they were pretty slow in the older version).
However, these new features have a cost: The removal of local searches – since these were totally reliant on the local database store of tweets – but I won’t miss that. Group columns will on first startup look a little sparse – since groups are populated from the All Tweets data feed when you first open TweetDeck. There will only be 200 tweets in the All Tweets column to populate the groups, but of course if you leave TweetDeck running then it will hold all the incoming tweets and the groups will soon fill up.
You can also set things up so that Tweetdeck will auto-add someone to your friend list when they follow you, or remove them when they unfollow. You can track conversations better with the new “in reply to” link. You can also now delete tweets from Twitter from within Tweetdeck.
The most important for me is the new ability to click and “add to group” button the profile panel, which means I can track particular Twitterers better. Roll on Twitter heaven…