While I was having lunch with my buddy and fellow twitterer @wittyphrase we got to discussing twitter, and that naturally led to discussing tweetdeck, one of the most popular twitter clients to date. Tweedeck is a great tool for organizing and managing your twitter life, but it could be better, here are a few suggestions.
Replace “Mystery Meat” Navigation
What do these buttons do? Can you tell? I couldn’t, and it took me about a week to get used to the fact you have to roll over each button in order to discern its function. I think useability would increase by making the functions of the buttons more apparent, even if that means adding a label to the right of the button or whatever (or replacing the icon with a label).
Time Format
I am not in the military, and thus 24hr time does not instantly correlate to 12hr time for me. Also, I don’t like doing math. It would be nice if the time format were configurable so I could choose between 12 and 24hr time formats.
Group Memory
I use tweetdeck both at home and at work. It is pretty annoying that when I get home, I need to “regroup” all the tweeps I had seperated into groups at work. If there was some persistence of the groups across machines that would be incredibly useful.
Drag and Drop
Because I am a Flex Developer, I can tell you right now tweedeck was built in Flex, which is cool. I can also tell you drag and drop is very easy to implement in Flex and would be a huge useability plus for tweetdeck. Being able to drag columns around and drag users to and from groups would be much easier than the current process which involves clicking alot of buttons and checking a lot of checkboxes.
Filtering
If I have created a group and added tweeps to it, I don’t need to also see their tweets repeated in my “All Friends” column. If a person is in a group, omit their tweets from the main timeline, or at least make it an option, its rather cumbersom seeing the same tweet in different columns.
More About Me
Tweetdeck doesn’t tell me much about myself. It would be nice if it showed my avatar in the top right along with my API stats. Information on following/followers for my account would be nice as well, especially if it were realtime updated along with the rest of the UI. Right now I have to switch to the Twitter web interface to see new followers and that to me is a nuisance.
Make Tweetdeck Web Accessible
Tweetdeck is built on Flex and AIR, so it should be pretty easy to implement a straight web interface without the AIR wrapper. This would be especially useful if they implemented persisting groups, that way i could use tweetdeck from a webpage at the library and still have all my tweeps neatly organized into groups, and I wouldn’t have to download any executables or runtime environments!
Conversation View
It would be nice if tweetdeck allowed you to break conversation out of the main column somehow. Not really sure what the best way to implement this would be, but tracking back through a converstation using tweetdeck is not always the easiest thing. Showing a conversation similar to the way twitter search does would be very useful.
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That’s all I got, if you have more ideas please post them up in the comments. I really like Tweetdeck, but its the lil things that keep me waiting for “the next great client” that will address all these issues and truly serves as my one stop twitter shop.
Oh, Kevin Rose told me to do this: Follow me on Twitter!
