Yesterday saw the final ceremony for the Shorty Awards, the awards which honour "the best producers of short, real-time content on Twitter".
Thanks to all the votes you cast online, TweetDeck made it into the final under the heading of "The Year's Best Apps On Twitter", so we sent along Sam Mandel, our man in the Big Apple, to TheTimesCenter in New York with his fingers crossed.
And it turns out that all that finger-crossing did the trick, as TweetDeck was announced the winner - an amazing result for us!
Over to our roving reporter Sam, for the news from the ceremony. Warning, this report contains a muppet...
"As the New York outpost of TweetDeck, I had the honor of accepting our award for Best Application at the Second Annual Shorty Awards last night.
Despite moving from last year's location (a bar in Brooklyn) to the more formal confines of the New York Times Center, the awards were great fun and very well organized, with CNN's Rick Sanchez keeping things moving at a fast pace.
It was a thrill to meet a few celebrities (Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, Newark Mayor Cory Booker, and especially Grover from Seasame Street), and to see the great things people are doing within the Twitter medium.
Most of all, as at every real time web event, it was great to see how many people were using TweetDeck and hear from members of the TweetDeck community how our product makes their online life easier and more rewarding, as well as how we can make TweetDeck even better in the future."
So on behalf of the entire TweetDeck team, we want to say a huge thank you to every one who voted for us - you really are the most amazing community. It is because of you that we keep striving to make TweetDeck the best that we can.
Also our great thanks go to the organisers of the awards for putting on a great evening and for looking after Sam so well :)
And finally, thanks to Grover, for giving us a picture of Sam that will grace the walls of the Batcave for years to come!
One of the great thing about being a small company is that each new member of team can potentially have an effect (on the team and our products) which is greater than the sum of the parts and as such I'm very careful about who we bring into team and ultimately who we give the Batcave access codes to. So, with that in mind, I'm very proud to welcome Max Howell to the TweetDeck team.
Max comes hot from Last.fm where he lead development of the hugely successful desktop and mobile clients and, as some of you may be aware, is a well respected figure in the github community and author of Homebrew, a project which is due to overtake Ruby on Rails in terms of github popularity. And that has only scratched the surface as to what Max has been up to in the past few years.
In his own words Max is open source, prolific, multi language, design skilled with attention to detail and good eye for aesthetics. He also has one of the deepest voices I've heard in a long time so may give Richard a run for his money on the silky smooth TweetDeck video voiceover front.
So it's pretty obvious Max is a prodigious talent and a great addition to the team but what will he be doing at TweetDeck? In a word mobile. And lots of it. More annoucements to come on the other new members of the team.
Marty: Wait a minute. Wait a minute Doc, uh, are you telling me you built a time machine... out of a DeLorean?
Doc Brown: The way I see it, if you're going to build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style?
Back To The Future
Time and the Real-Time Web wait for no man (or woman, presumably...).
Now, until we release what we are calling the "Marty McFly Module" there is certainly not a lot we can do to help you as far as Time is concerned here at TweetDeck, but with our latest release we are giving you an update that will certainly allow you to blast through the real-time web faster and easier than ever before.
Here are some of the headlines for this exciting new release.
Hop on board for API heaven!
At this year's Le Web conference, Ryan Sarver from the Platform Team at Twitter announced the imminent availability of an increased API rate limit for those applications accessing the API using a method called OAuth.
We are delighted to announce that TweetDeck v0.33 accesses the API using OAuth in the background and can thus take advantage of this increased API limit. At the time of writing this post, the new limit is 350 calls per hour, but this is expected to increase further soon.
We think this increased limit is a very exciting move, allowing you even greater flexibility than before to configure your TweetDeck exactly how you want it without having to worry about running out of API calls.
Alongside this increased limit, we have also introduced an automatic intelligent API management option, which we highly recommend as the ideal way to ensure you get the most out of your API allowance. This will also ensure that as and when the limit increases further, your TweetDeck will just start making the most of it straight away.
Get the big picture with the Column Navigator
It's all well and good being an uber-tweeting social-media genius, but when your TweetDeck columns extend for miles off the screen, what you need is the big picture.
Enter the Column Navigator. This handy new feature, nestled in the previously empty space at the bottom of the screen, shows a representation of all your columns and allows you to navigate around them quickly by simply clicking.
Hovering over a bar in the navigator also shows some key information such as the time remaining before this column refreshes and the current level of API calls remaining.
We hope you will find this a handy addition to your TweetDeck, and we look forward to refining and improving it based on your feedback.
More Media Magic
You can now view more photos and videos inside TweetDeck than ever before.
Clicking on links to Youtube videos will now show the video in a TweetDeck preview window. Flickr image links will also now open in a preview, along with pictures from Posterous, Mobypicture and Twitgoo.
And we have added Mobypicture to the list of available image upload services, giving you even more choice for sharing your favourite photos.
Your browser just became a little bit more redundant...
Love your search columns? Now edit them with ease
Search columns have always been a hugely important part of using TweetDeck.
However the one difficulty has always not being able to edit your boolean masterpiece once you had created it. Making a small tweak to your search terms was impossible, causing, quite rightly, some frustration.
We recognised this difficulty and so in v0.33 it is now possible to edit the definition of your search columns. Just click the Edit button on the column header, edit your search terms and click Save. Your column will continue to refresh using your new search query.
A small, but very welcome change, we think you'll agree.
Helping us, helping you
There is a brand new help screen within the application that should help you and us.
From this screen you can access some "getting started" videos, ideal for new users. There is also a search box to help you find answers to your TweetDeck questions in our FAQ forum.
Wondering if you have the latest version of TweetDeck? Use the version checker on the new help screen.
If you have logged a support ticket with us, you can also automatically submit full diagnostic information to us by just entering your ticket number and clicking Submit. Super simple but hugely helpful, and saving all of us a lot of time and effort.
A bit of spit and polish
Version 0.33 contains more fixes, tweaks and minor improvements than you can shake a reasonably-sized stick at. We have picked up on issues old and new from across the application to ensure your TweetDecking experience is the best it can be.
Version 0.33 of TweetDeck is available to download now from www.tweetdeck.com. You can see the full changelog here.
In other news...
As expected, 2010 is shaping up to be a very busy year for us.
Not only are we continuing to innovate on the desktop and iPhone, ensuring you always have the best client around, but we are also progressing our plans for branching out into other mobile platforms. We are expanding our team (more news of that in a later post) and we are well on track to be appearing on several new devices soon.
The TweetDeck Directory continues to go from strength to strength and is improving all the time. The Directory currently contains thousands of great Twitter Lists for you to follow, and we'll be supplementing this soon with some very exciting new features that we think you'll really love.
So thanks for all your support. We really appreciate all the great feedback we get from you and we hope that you are as excited about the future of TweetDeck as we are!
Just noticed something cool and wanted to share. If you're using bit.ly to shorten URLs and add a Techcrunch (techcrunch.com) or Onion (theonion.com) URL to the compose window in TweetDeck, instead of shortening to a bit.ly link you'll get an appropriately branded short URL i.e. tcrn.ch or onion.com.
I've subsequently learnt (from the bit.ly guys) this is part of a new bit.ly PRO service and these branded URLs will soon be opened up to all bit.ly PRO enterprise users. From a user point of view short URLs with a greater sense of transparency can't be bad and as a publisher getting potentially thousands of additional brand mentions in the stream wouldn't hurt either.
So if you notice URLs shortening to something other than bit.ly in your TweetDeck, don't panic - this is expected and potentially rather interesting. Might be worth registering that short URL for your brand sooner rather than later. Could someone build a short URL generator?
UPDATE: use http://domai.nr for a short domain generator (thanks yahelc)
Happy New Year TweetDeckers! We hope you all had a great festive season and that 2010 is off to a good start for you.
We are kicking our new year off in fine form with a feature-packed update to the TweetDeck iPhone app, which is available now from the App Store.
v.1.3 of TweetDeck for the iPhone now gets up to speed with the desktop version in some key areas such as Lists and Retweets. We have also introduced geo-coding of tweets using your iPhone's GPS.
Keep up with your favourite Twitter Lists
You can now take your Twitter Lists with you wherever you go by adding columns to your TweetDeck for iPhone.
Mobile retweets - whichever way you prefer
Just like in the desktop client, you can choose which method you want to use each time you retweet. New-style or old, its up to you. TweetDeck will remember your preference, but you can change it with a touch each time you RT.
Location, location, location
Want to show where in the world you are right now? Enable geo-tagging and your tweets will be automatically tagged with your current location from the GPS in your iPhone.
Want to see where your friend is tweeting from? Check out the inline map in the tweet detail screen.
Where is everybody?
And the jewel in the geo-location crown is the super-cool "View on Map" feature. This will take all the geo-coded tweets from the column you choose and plot them on a map. You can then see in an instant where all your Twitter friends are at the moment and can zoom in for more details.
Never be stuck for company again! Simply fire up your TweetDeck, see who's nearby and get in touch.
And more...
There have also been lots of fixes and tweaks "under the hood", including a fix for the issue that was affecting a lot of users when trying to add their Facebook account.
The future
2010 is going to be a huge year for us here at TweetDeck, and for our mobile offerings in particular.
Expect to see lots of big news over the next few months as we open up a whole new chapter in our mobile strategy, taking our approach of "Be the best, not just the first" into some very exciting areas.
So before you ask....chances are, we're coming to your phone soon!
"You consider that to be important?" he [Inspector Gregory] asked.
"Exceedingly so."
"Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"
"To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."
"The dog did nothing in the night-time."
"That was the curious incident," remarked Sherlock Holmes.
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1893)
As you're probably aware our world of TweetDeck doesn't stand still for long, if at all, and we've all been working on a variety of upgrades for our supported platforms (and a few which are not currently supported). Some of the fruits of our labour have already come to bear and others will be released in, what promises to be, a rather exciting new year. Alongside the development of our core products we've also been partnering up with a select group of bands, record labels, movie studios and media companies to develop themed TweetDecks. These special TweetDecks not only offer a potentially radical look and feel but also a dedicated channel straight to the artist or movie alongside the usual TweetDeck columns.
One such superb partner is Warner Brothers, and I'm very pleased to announce we have been working closely with them over the past few months to produce a Sherlock Holmes TweetDeck (called the "TweetDeck Telegram Co.") which ties-in nicely with the holiday release of Sherlock Holmes (the movie) and the 221b online game.
The TweetDeck Telegram Co. takes you back to a time before coloured avatars, shiny interfaces and rounded corners where the latest gossip on London life is spread by the Society Spy and the intimate details of life with Mr Holmes & Dr Watson is shared by their house keeper Mrs Hudson. The TweetDeck Telegram Co. gives you a direct channel to these characters and more from the 221b game.
221b is a two-player online game immersing you into the world of Sherlock Holmes and Dr.John Watson which takes you through the events leading up to the very first scene of the new Sherlock Holmes film. You can play with a friend, one as Holmes, one as Watson, or you can even play alone if you like, taking on the role of both characters. Just as in the stories, you and your friend will investigate crimes, sift through evidence and solve mysteries. You'll also have to stake your reputation as detectives on your deductions. Get them right and you'll soon be the envy of Scotland Yard.
Today we have launched TweetDeck for Desktop v0.32.5.
This release integrates some aspects of the new TweetDeck Directory into the desktop application, so you can now explore and discover great Lists even easier than before.
You can also now view List comments from the TweetDeck Directory when viewing a List profile. You can even add your own comments too, allowing you to contribute to the conversation without having to open your browser.
Add to this a collection of fixes for some troublesome problems, and you have quite a big "small" update!
Here's a run-down of what's included in this release:
Improved List profile page which now allows you to view and add comments and ratings to the TweetDeck Directory for the list
Updated display of new-style retweet to now show "RT by username" next to the original tweeter's username. Clicking the retweeter's username will open their profile as normal.
Fixed issues in detailed notification window with new-style retweets as well as Facebook & LinkedIn commenting.
Introduced image caching for profile pictures
For more details, see the announcement in TweetDeck Support.
Today we are delighted to announce a very exciting new version of the TweetDeck Directory.
Back in September we introduced the TweetDeck Directory to make it easier to find and follow your favourite subjects on Twitter. The Directory was very popular and thousands of you have used it to find interesting people to follow on Twitter.
The arrival of Twitter Lists onto the scene gave us a huge opportunity to make the Directory even better by focusing on using the power of Twitter Lists to make the Directory into something very special indeed.
And so today we would like to introduce you to the new TweetDeck Directory. Now totally dynamic and bulging with all the features you need to find great Lists to follow
Here's a rundown of some of these great new features in detail.
Categories galore
The Directory is now organised into over 140 categories, from Architecture to Video Games, from Advertising to Telecoms.
There's a category in the TweetDeck Directory for everyone.
Click to add
When you find a List you like, just click Add to TweetDeck to follow that list and add a column for it in your TweetDeck.
Always up to date
New Lists will be automatically discovered every day and added to the TweetDeck Directory, so you'll always be able to find the best Lists in real-time.
There's no need to ask to be included - just create your List and once it starts getting followers, it will be discovered automagically and included in the directory.
Explore and analyse
Selecting a List will reveal a vast array of information about that List, including member information, follower/following numbers, tweet volume, recent tweets and even a wordcloud.
Click through to an individual user to reveal a similar level of detail for that Twitter account.
Recommendations, history and more
The front page of the new Directory will show you personalised recommendations and Lists you have recently viewed. There is also an area highlighting new Lists that have just been added, ensuring you're always seeing the best new content.
There are also areas for "featured" lists, highlighting those Lists that are particularly interesting or topical at the moment.
Powerful search
Find Lists quickly and easily with the powerful search function. Search results are laid out in a clear preview style, allowing you to see at a glance which ones you want to follow.
Ratings and Comments
Found a great List that deserves recognition? Rate it to lift it in our rankings.
Feel the need to give your opinion? Leave a comment to start a conversation around a List.
Dynamic new design
The Directory has a fresh new look, with the important information presented in a clear and engaging style.
The new TweetDeck Directory heralds a new beginning for the www.tweetdeck.com website too. Up until now the website has mainly been just a place you visit to download the TweetDeck application. But we are now starting to develop the website into a destination that you will want to visit again and again.
The new Directory is only the first of many exciting new developments that we have planned, which will start to add a whole new facet to your TweetDeck experience.
We are all very excited about this new chapter in the evolution of the TweetDeck platform and we look forward to sharing lots more ideas with you soon.
A while ago we promised you that the next release of TweetDeck would be something very special. Well we have tweaked it and polished it and coated it with a sprinkling of TweetDeck magic dust, and now its ready for you enjoy.
There are so many shiny new features in this release that you may need to wear shades to use it.
For now though, here are just some of the goodies that are waiting for you in v0.32:
LinkedIn gets linked in
As we announced a few days ago, you can now add your LinkedIn account to TweetDeck. This will allow you to interact with your network of professional contacts just as easily as you can with your Twitter, Facebook and Myspace friends. You can add a LinkedIn column to view updates from your network, view profiles and comment on your contacts' status updates. And send your own update direct from LinkedIn, cross-posting to any of your other accounts at the same time if you wish.
Lists at the heart of the application
That's what we promised you, so that's what you've got. Twitter Lists in full, glorious TweetDeck style. Export your old TweetDeck Groups to new Twitter Lists or create Lists from scratch. We'll even give you great suggestions for who to add. Explore your friend's lists, following and creating columns when you find Lists you like. You can even create your own List by copying someone else's and adding your own je ne sais quoi.
Although your old TweetDeck groups are still available to you, you won't be able to create any more. Twitter Lists offer pretty much everything that Groups did, but with the added advantage of being fully compatible with Twitter. We think that you will agree when you see how Lists work in TweetDeck, so expect to see a lot more from us about Lists in the near future. We are very excited about our Lists-based future and we can't wait to show you what we are planning.
Retweets – Which style? Your choice!
Love them or hate them, the new-style Twitter Retweets are here to stay. And TweetDeck now fully supports them. New-style retweets will show up in your timelines, flagged with the retweet indicator and showing both the original tweeter's picture and the retweeter's picture.
But we know that there are many of you who would rather stick with the old tried-and-tested old-style retweets, allowing comments and editing.
So we have given you the choice. Each time you retweet you can choose to “Retweet now” using the new-style, or “Edit then Retweet” which will give you an old-style retweet. Don't want to have to choose each time? No problem. Just tick “Remember my choice” and TweetDeck will default to whichever option you choose.
Location, location, location
Another new feature that Twitter have recently rolled out is geo-location. This allows your tweets to be tagged with your current location, a function offered by an increasing number of Twitter clients.
In this version of TweetDeck, geo-coded tweets are identified by a yellow pin at the bottom of the tweet. Clicking on this pin will reveal an inline map showing the location that the tweet was sent from. Click the pin again and the map disappears. Be aware though, TweetDeck for desktop will not currently geo-code your outgoing tweets. This function will be available in TweetDeck for mobile very soon however.
Smarter and simpler
Adding more and more great features to TweetDeck is all well and good, but we need to make sure you can use them easily. So in v0.32 we have placed a big emphasis on improving the user interface for key parts of the application.
For instance, the standard toolbar buttons for adding columns have been replaced with a slick new Add Column screen which is now a one-stop-shop for managing columns, Lists and Groups in TweetDeck. We have spruced up the Settings window and the Profile window has also had a make-over.
There are lots more improvement to the user interface to come as well, so expect your TweetDeck to become a whole lot smarter in the future.
...and all the rest
Alongside these major new features, there are also a host of other tweaks, updates and fixes to help make your TweetDeck experience even better.
To get the full changelog, head over to TweetDeck Support, where you will also find a lot more detailed information about the changes in v0.32.
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