Subscribers

I’m a huge fan of the Twitter application Tweetdeck . Tweetdeck essentiatlly helps organize the often chaotic social networking site to save you time. It does this by allowing you to keep track of your followers by putting their tweets into digestable groups, among other things. One of the biggest challenges of Tweetdeck was the amount of API it sometimes sucked up if you tried to do too much in the interface and weren’t managing the number of API calls you asked the application to make in an hour.

The latest version 0.21.5b not only provides measures to address these API concerns, but adds an entire other layer to the time-saving features offered. Included below is a list of the major enhancements that I’ve been able to notice with this version. To see these in action, check out this great video tutorial by non-proft social media consultant John Haydon .

Besides the Direct Message, Reply and Retweet options, the biggest, most notable change is that when you mouse over someone’s avatar, the ‘fourth icon’ is now named Other Actions. If you choose this icon, a fly-out navigation menu appears giving you the ability to:

* Email a tweet to somone (Using the default Microsoft email of course)
* Translate the tweet (I clicked on this and nothing happened – so assume it’s for non-English tweets)
* Untranslate a tweet (Again nothing happend when I clicked this – but to assume again, I imagine it’s to undo what you translated)

Other items in the Other Actions drop down include the ability to follow or unfollow someone, Search, View the tweeter’s profile, Mark as Read, Delete, Favourite and Add to a Group.

Being able to view the profile and add to a group without the extra clicks should save a few API calls and in general makes the interface that much easier and faster to use. What will save even more of those API calls comes from some new options in the Settings tab. You now have the ability to open profiles in web pages vs. in Tweetdeck – again to save API calls. I think this is really quite brilliant.

Other new setting options include:
* Choose how many tweets to keep in a column (automatically set at 500)
* The ability to hide direct messages after you’ve sent them or tweets you’ve marked (when you restart the system)

The other big news that hashtag users will love, is that when you reply to someone who used a hashtag, Tweetdeck now automatically picks up the hashtag and puts in the reply for you. This is just another wonderful time saving measure (and will avoid some typos I’m sure).

I’m thinking there are a least a couple of other new items, so feel free to let me know what I might have missed in this list.