Twitter is actively working on a “big overhaul” of its TweetDeck platform, which allows it to organize lists and feeds into easy-to-read vertical lines, and plans to share more information on the project later this year, said product manager Kayvon Beykpour. has a Interview with The edge Posted on Tuesday.
TweetDeck, as one of the oldest and originally third-party account management apps for the platform, hasn’t seen many major design or feature changes in years. The app launched 12 years ago and was acquired by Twitter in 2011, and it’s still pretty much the same vertical grid viewer for your various Twitter feeds that it started with. For the most part, Twitter has added new features to its main website and mobile apps, keeping TweetDeck’s main layout relatively static.
It seems to be changing. Beykpour and the product team acknowledge that they haven’t “given TweetDeck much love recently” and are actively working on a new TweetDeck that they plan to show later this year. This is part of a larger effort to improve Twitter’s developer tools and repair its relationship with app makers, the latter Long-standing conflict between Twitter and the broader software development community.. (Beykpour’s response does not specify whether the new TweetDeck will be released this year or will simply be presented to the public.)
Here is Beykpour’s full response regarding TweetDeck:
Nilay Patel: The edgeThe newsroom works on TweetDeck.
Beykpour: Totally. And we haven’t liked TweetDeck much lately. It’s about to change; We’ve been working on a pretty big review from scratch of TweetDeck, and it’s something we’re excited to share publicly this year. And that’s just one example of a service owned and operated by Twitter that we’ll continue to invest in. Also, in the last five years, I think, we haven’t given a lot of love to our developer ecosystem. Lots of reasons for that, a few missteps we’ve taken in the past, and then some sort of prioritization as well. We are also changing that; Over the past year and a half, we’ve really stepped up our engagement and tracking to just innovate again around the API, bringing the API back to par with our own internal APIs that we use to develop functionality.
I think we are very confident in convincing the developers because we have made a lot of mistakes in the past, but this is something that we are actively investing in. We hope to allow developers to create some really amazing things on top of the Twitter ecosystem. One of the reasons Twitter is where it is today is because the developers are doing cool things we never thought we were doing. And this is something that we try to do more, not to escape. More to come as well.
It’s unclear whether this new TweetDeck would feature a redesigned visual design, entirely new features, or both. There is also some question as to whether Twitter is considering possibly charging money for TweetDeck; at Bloomberg report last month He said the company is considering a premium version of TweetDeck that it could add a subscription fee to.
Whatever form the new app takes, it’ll be a breath of fresh air for veteran TweetDeck users (myself included) who want, at the very least, a fresh coat of paint.
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