Now that Twitter has acquired TweetDeck for as much as $50 million, lets hope the social media behemoth can help its favorite client out with future updates to its iPhone app (if there will even be an independent app after the acquisition closes).
If the goal of a redesign is to impress enough to make non-users switch, TweetDeck has failed, at least for this Twitter user. Combining bad style choices with questionable layout issues makes for one lousy Twitter app.
Let’s start with the style. One of the things most pleasant about the Twitter app I favor, Echofon, is how easy it is to read. That seems like an obvious mark to hit for an app that you have to read to appreciate. For me, Echofon’s standard black text on a white background does the job.
TweetDeck favors a gray background on white text, and puts the username of the tweet you’re reading below the message rather than right before it. Reading tweets before I realize who sent them seems unintuitive.
For all my complaining about how tricky it is to actually read the tweets coming in, it might be the best part of the app, other than the @mentions page, which functions more or less the same as it would in any other app.
That ease and familiarity takes a turn for the bizarre when it comes to your DM inbox. Instead of threading together messages from the same sender, all of your correspondence is slapped onto one page for you to sort out. This can make finding an older message from a contact you don’t regularly DM with an exercise in frustration.
Although I have never used the TweetDeck app before, this revision certainly won’t get me to make the switch. It feels thrown together and unorganized. When the best thing you can say about a Twitter app is that it’s free, you don’t need to stop to check it out.
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