Enterprise-ready Twitter Management: TweetDeck for iPhone Delivers

by Bill French on 17/06/09 at 2:20 am

Bill French is an information architect specializing in Internet applications. He is also the co-founder of MyST Technology Partners and Senior Editor for iPhoneCTO

I was not ready for this evening’s TweetDeck upgrade; it totally surprised me because of the depth and planning that went into version 0.26. One word – brilliant! My first glance at TweetDeck for iPhone was a delightful ending to a long day.

This release is a game-changer for many reasons, but most important is the ability to replicate your customized configuration across all devices where you manage and follow Twitter conversations.

A while back I complained about general design of desktop Twitter clients suggesting that these tools were creating more problems than they were solving. Most business users of Twitter create and manage groups, persistent searches, and multiple Twitter accounts. Trying to maintain such configurations across multiple devices such as PC, Mac, and iPhone was a nightmare; indeed a counterproductive and seemingly futile exercise. This problem forced many businesses to seek out web-based products such as CoTweet and HootSuite, both of which create relief from the insanity created by desktop application architectures that work as isolated islands of Twitter functionality.

TweetDeck v0.26 [beta] virtually eliminates this problem and scores a big hit for business people responsible for brand and conversation management with Twitter through its new synch feature which serves as a backup and a configuration replication service across all devices where you manage your Twitter conversations. This is a critical feature for many reasons – the most obvious is the productivity gain – you no longer must configure each device platform with the same business logic to experience consistent performance. Twitter power-users generally don’t think much about the effort they put into their client setups as business logic or a key intellectual asset, but the effort is significant and the investment represents significant amounts of time over the long run.

TweetDeck’s new synch feature preserves your complete configuration in the cloud which makes it simple to replicate your Twitter management approach consistently and wherever you happen to be working. It’s not perfect – my first look at this feature revealed that your Twitter accounts (if you manage multiple accounts) must be added on each device. This is also a new feature in TweetDeck – the ability to view, manage, and tweet across multiple accounts; a key requirement for PR folks, brand managers, and marketing organizations.

The iPhone app, which was released simultaneously with this new version, is stellar; a pleasure to use. It leverages most of the great features that have made TweetDeck for the desktop one of the best Twitter clients. There are some rough edges and I noticed a few problem areas including a few crashes when I tried to add more than 6 panes. To TweetDeck’s credit, the app actually advises you not to add more than 6 panes because of performance issues. But there are clearly some bugs and shortcomings in this beta as F. Andy Seidl points out.

Other new and innovative features in this release are abundant. They’ve added spam controls, TwitScoop integration as well as a local trends analyzer that makes it possible to spot trends even in searches or in your own friends activity.

While TweetDeck version 0.26 is a significant upgrade and likely to attract professional users, it will eventually need features such as scheduled posts to compete with CoTweet and HootSweet. Integrated analytics is also a hot button for professional Twitter users.

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