
Twitter kills TweetDeck for Windows, automates log-ins for TweetDeck users - protomyth
http://techcrunch.com/2016/03/17/twitter-kills-tweetdeck-for-windows-automates-logins-for-tweetdeck-users/
======
Mithaldu
> The company said it made the decision to abandon development on Windows so
> it could “better focus on enhancing your TweetDeck experience,”

Haha, what a bald-faced lie.

They absolutely murdered tweetdeck by buying it a few years ago and releasing
a "remade" version with 90% of the features removed. Officially abandoning the
desktop client just means they've finally finished what they began and taken
the old guy behind the shed.

~~~
mchahn
> Officially abandoning the desktop client just means they've finally finished
> what they began and taken the old guy behind the shed.

Do you think they are really abandoning it for all platforms? I was thinking
how different the world was that the Mac is given more attention than Windows
now. I remember many years when the opposite was true.

~~~
smitherfield
Probably because they can share most of the codebase between Mac and iOS.

~~~
wesbos
It's built in html/CSS/js

------
jacquesm
I don't think there has been a week since the beginning of the year when
Twitter did not make some kind of move that was either hostile to users or
developers. I really can't follow their strategy any more.

~~~
wslh
I don't see any strategy, I see fear. I feel sorry for the developers
relationship guy who tried to defend Twitter in HN yesterday and was lost in
action immediately. I haven't seen anything like that for a company like
Twitter. They don't know how to play the game of the big leagues.

I think it will be better to them to close their API and show their real face
instead of being ambiguous.

~~~
x5n1
Twitter has been always horrible for developers. Makes no sense. If I were
doing a service like Twitter I would make firehose available to everyone. It's
more important to dominate than control.

~~~
ThomPete
Not if you have to live off advertising.

~~~
sp332
I don't see why they have to live off advertising. Right now they're charging
a ton of money for firehose access through Gnip. They could charge power users
for access to cooler features and better analytics, or just charge developers
gradually more money for more traffic instead of having a hard rate limit.

~~~
exolymph
Social networks need to be free so they can gain as many users as possible and
generate network effects. Anything but advertising messes with the incentives.
[https://stratechery.com/2014/ello-consumer-friendly-
business...](https://stratechery.com/2014/ello-consumer-friendly-business-
models/)

~~~
sp332
Ello made things weird for new users. The stuff I'm talking about would only
affect commercial users, or people who are already heavily invested in being
on Twitter.

------
bachmeier
TweetDeck is honestly the only way I've found to make Twitter usable. Twitter
the idea is great. Twitter the company is so bad that its existence makes me
question how capitalism has survived as long as it has.

~~~
bradgessler
Check out [http://tapbots.com/tweetbot/](http://tapbots.com/tweetbot/), but
don't tell Twitter about them so they don't get acquired and shut down.

~~~
joshontheweb
I really wanted to like tweetbot but it beachballs allllll the time. It's a
shame because twitter really screwed up their new version of twitter for mac.
I'm left without a usable twitter client atm :/

~~~
taurath
You'd think their team of 2500 engineers could release a working app or two.

------
jackfoxy
Now seriously considering abandoning Twitter, which is a real shame. It's the
primary communications channel for the world-wide F# community. I guess I have
until April 15 to decide. And just after I'd finally cleaned-up my timeline
feed by judicious use of mute.

------
colemickens
And replies are still broken. When you reply to a tweet in TweetDeck, it
prepends the new tweet with your handle. Which makes absolutely no sense.
Users have been reporting it for over a month and they just don't care to do
anything about it.

------
partiallypro
IF they started rolling out TweetDeck features to the official Twitter app on
Windows 10, I would find this excusable...but given @Jack's mishandling of
virtually ever aspect of Twitter since his return...I have a feeling this is
an on going symptom of a much broader problem Twitter has. I think Twitter is
a very useful tool, but seriously someone like Microsoft or Google need to buy
it and kick out all of the top management to the curb. I have rarely, if ever,
seen a major company being so poorly ran in such a public fashion.

~~~
nier
What about Apple? Wouldn’t Twitter be a perfect replacement for Apple Music’s
Connect feature?

~~~
partiallypro
I just don't view Apple as an information company like I do Google and
Microsoft. Don't feel it mixes all that well with their other verticals.
Twitter is a perfect search engine companion.

------
joseacta
They just updated their UWP app for Windows 10 this week and added a bunch of
features. It makes no sense to support two different apps on the same
platform.

[https://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/store/apps/twitter/9wzdncrfj...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/store/apps/twitter/9wzdncrfj140)

Good to see they're focusing efforts on Windows 10.

------
incepted
Just when you think "Ok, Twitter has gone pretty low but I'm pretty sure they
can't anger their users any more"... they do.

------
lotsoflumens
I found TweetDeck a few years ago and I gave it a permanent place in the top
left corner of my desktop on my browsing machine immediately.

It solved all the problems I was having with the web app - huge memory usage
mainly.

If there's no alternative on Windows, then I guess I'm going to get a lot more
work done.

------
whatnotests
TweetDeck is useless. I honestly wonder what social media managers with, say,
a dozen or more social media accounts (not just Twitter) actually use.

My clueless googling revealed nothing.

~~~
jacquesm
> TweetDeck is useless.

It is now, but it wasn't always so. At some point it was simply the 'better
twitter ui'.

~~~
alblue
And that's why they had to kill it. Instead of investing the time and effort
to make the real UI better, their plan was simply to make other clients worse
until everyone was forced back onto one giant web platform that they can
monetise with adverts.

~~~
athenot
Unfortunately, it looks a lot like Facebook's playbook.

