Here at Communiqué, we not only use Twitter to keep up to date on local, national and world news and trends, but to also monitor coverage and public perceptions on behalf of our clients. In order for us to keep track of everything, we needed a powerful application that could handle multiple accounts and established searches. To accomplish this task, we have come to rely on TweetDeck. While there are certainly other options such as HootSuite and Twitterific, TweetDeck allows users to break down accounts, groups and searches into separate columns, making viewing streams easy and quick. It even allows you to integrate your Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Buzz and MySpace accounts all for free.
Recently, TweetDeck was updated to version 0.35. While no cosmetic changes were made, this update brought a number of useful changes for users such as the ability to cross-post Twitter updates longer than 140 characters. To do this, the user must have both a Google Buzz and Twitter account. Then while posting an update through TweetDeck, the user selects both the Buzz and Twitter accounts, and continues to type more than 140 characters. Once the update is sent on TweetDeck, the full message will be posted to your Buzz account and the tweet will contain the first 116 characters with a link to the full update on Buzz.
Another update that is useful to users is the support for t.co links in the main feed. T.co is Twitter’s proprietary URL shortening service. The difference between t.co and other URL shortening services like bit.ly and ow.ly is that, each link shortened by t.co is checked against a list of malicious sites to identify malware, phishing attacks and other harmful activity. If there is potentially harmful information at the URL destination, the user is warned. Also, in TweetDeck, when a user hovers the cursor over a t.co link, they will be given the full URL preview. This feature is beneficial because as Twitter gains more popularity, hackers will begin using it more and more often to attack users. This is just an extra step that Twitter and TweetDeck, have put in place to help prevent any of these attacks.
While these two additions were the highlight of the recent update, many other features were added and bugs were fixed. For example, now users can add a trending topics column in TweetDeck. Also added was support for previewing and uploading images directly in TweetDeck via Plixi, a photo sharing service. If you are looking for a powerful, feature packed Twitter application, I highly recommend checking out TweetDeck.
We would also love to hear what Twitter applications you use. Leave us a comment with your suggestions below.