An application near and dear to the heart of Twitter fanatics everywhere, TweetDeck, is now available as a Web application.
Twitter announced the new version (built with HTML 5) of the popular program Friday. A nice feature of the Web edition of the software is it will sync itself with releases of the program running on other platforms so accounts, columns, layouts, and settings remain consistent whether you’re using the app on a PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad, or Android device.
Anyone familiar with TweetDeck should have no problem negotiating its online counterpart. Tweet streams, as well as Facebook feed, are organized into columns. Default columns include tweets from your home page feed, tweets mentioning you, and tweets in your inbox; but you can add or remove columns as you like.
A button for adding new columns is located at the top of the TweetDeck screen, along with controls for writing a new tweet, navigating among columns, and searching Twitter. When you perform a search, an “add column” button appears in the pop-up window of the search results, so you can quickly add a column to the main screen based on the search.
Tweets within columns can be sliced and diced in a number of ways. You can filter a column based on a trending topic, hashtag, individual user, mentions, or favorites, just to name a few.
If you want to see profile information about the author of a tweet, you can click on their photo and their profile will appear in a pop-up window. Along with the profile are thumbnails for displaying the person’s tweets, mentions, lists, timeline, and favorites.
Double-clicking on a tweet in a column expands the item. From the expanded item, you can open a menu to perform tasks such as replying to the tweet, sending a direct message to its author, blocking the person from your tweet stream, report the person as a spammer, or follow (or unfollow) the tweeter.
Also from the expanded tweet, you can reply to a tweet, re-tweet it, add it to you favorites or e-mail it to someone through controls at the bottom of the item.
You can compose your own tweets from TweetDeck, too, as well as upload photos. The software also lets you schedule when a tweet should be sent to your followers, similar to what’s offered by Buffer.
TweetDeck was purchased by Twitter in May for $40 million and although there were some fears that the company would gut the program, those anxious feelings appear to be unfounded. As this web release suggests, Twitter seems determined to keep improving the product.
Follow freelance technology writer John P. Mello Jr. and Today@PCWorld on Twitter.