As Twitter’s Influence on TweetDeck Becomes Clear in Latest Update, Users Seek More Options
If you didn’t hear the news way back when, Twitter bought TweetDeck. We didn’t know what this meant, initially – they’ve bought third-party Twitter developers before and we saw them merge those people into their software team. For TweetDeck, their existence (at least in the way we once knew it) wasn’t wiped off the face of the internet.
Users are starting to feel the effects of the acquisition, however, as recent TweetDeck updates have been to transform the client into a way Twitter sees most fitting for their service. In the most recent update, they didn’t add or fix anything, but instead removed a feature everyone loved – deck.ly support.
Deck.ly is a competitor of TwitLonger and is basically a solution for long-winded users who don’t like breaking their thoughts up into several 140 character tweets. Above you is the graph on TweetDeck’s Android market page showing installs in the past 30 days. As you can see, their changes have resulted in a sharp decline.
The motive is clear – Twitter wants people to express themselves in 140 characters or less. That gimmick is what got them to the promised land, after all, so we can’t be too slighted by the move. And while TweetDeck remains largely the same since it was introduced last year, their new, snail-paced development cycles and their willingness to remove features to appease to Twitter has users worried and looking for other options.
For those not in the know, there definitely are several nice alternatives in the Android market. While they may not offer the unique columns-based experience TweetDeck does, they are all excellent Twitter clients in their own light. We’ve got offerings such as Plume, TweetCaster, Seesmic and Twidroyd sitting at the top of our list. Do you have a Twitter client to suggest that we haven’t? Let us know below!