Twitter is actively working on a “major overhaul” of its TweetDeck platform, which allows you to arrange lists and feeds in vertical rows that are easy to read, and plans to share more publicly about the project later this year, the product head said. Kayvon Beykpour, said. in an interview with The edge Published Tuesday.
TweetDeck, as one of the oldest and original third-party application account management programs for the platform, has not seen much in the way of design or major feature changes over the years. The app was launched 12 years ago and was acquired by Twitter in 2011, and it’s pretty much the same vertical grid viewer for your various Twitter feeds after which it started. Twitter has mostly transferred new features added to the main website and mobile applications, while the core of the TweetDeck design is relatively static.
This seems to be changing. Beykpour and the product team admit that they did not give TweetDeck much love recently, and they are actively working on a new TweetDeck that they want to show later this year. It’s part of a broader push to improve Twitter’s developer tools and restore relationships with app makers, with the latter a long-running dispute between Twitter and the broader software development community. (Beykpour’s response does not specify whether the new TweetDeck will be released this year or simply viewed by the public.)
Here is Beykpour’s full answer regarding TweetDeck:
Nilay Patel: The edge‘s newsroom runs on TweetDeck.
Beykpour: Completely. And we recently did not give much love to TweetDeck. It is about to change; we were working on a fairly large renovation of TweetDeck at the beginning, and that’s something we want to share in public somewhere this year. And so this is just an example of a service owned and operated by Twitter, in which we will continue to invest. We also think we have not given much love to our developer ecosystem over the past five years. Quite a few reasons for that, a few erroneous mistakes we have made in the past, and then also a priority. We change that too; in the last year and a half, we have encouraged our dedication and succession to just start innovating around the API again, and then again the API again equal to our own internal APIs that we use to build functionality.
I think we have a lot of confidence to earn back from developers as we have made a lot of mistakes in the past, but this is something in which we are actively investing. We hope to enable our developers to really build. amazing things around the Twitter ecosystem. One of the reasons Twitter is today is because developers do cool shit that we would never have thought. And this is something we’re trying to do more of, and not walk away from. More on this coming too.
It’s not clear if this new TweetDeck will feature a refreshing visual design, new features or both. It can also be discussed whether Twitter plans to eventually charge money for TweetDeck; a Bloomberg The report said last month that the company was considering a premium version of TweetDeck to attach a subscription fee to it.
No matter what shape the new app takes, it will be a fresh breeze for TweetDeck’s longtime users (myself included) who want at least a fresh coat of paint.