A TweetDeck For Every Occasion
If you've been following the news you'll have noticed that TweetDeck is broadening into the mobile world. Maybe you're already rocking out with TweetDeck on the iPad or DMing your mates on TweetDeck iPhone. If you're REALLY in the loop you'll know that we're also working on a mega-project to bring the next generation TweetDeck to Android (more on that soon).
Really though, that's not enough. There are hundreds of millions of you out there happy with your BlackBerry, Palm, Windows Mobile or handmade, jewel encrusted Linux smartphone. You need TweetDeck on your mobile and you need it now. We hear you.
Several months ago we embarked on a secret mission to develop a cross-platform full-featured mobile TweetDeck. We looked at a lot of options and after much deliberation decided the best way forward was to build an amazing version of TweetDeck to run on mobile web browsers.
The trends are clear. Mobile web browsers are becoming more powerful and standards compliant. HTML5 is looming on the horizon, tempting us with all sorts of web-based goodness. Mobile internet access is getting better, faster, cheaper. But that's just the beginning.
Battery life is a big issue on all mobile devices but especially older platforms. Using TweetDeck Mobile Web means you can check out what's going on when you want to and not have an app using valuable resources constantly in the background. Not only will this be easier on the battery but your phone will perform better in general.
Accessibility is another big issue. Using TweetDeck will be as easy as going to our url in a browser. Now you can check out the latest hashtags on your friend's phone without enraging them by installing software that runs forever in the background. We've designed TweetDeck Mobile Web to work on really slimmed down devices, so pretty much anything with a web browser will do.
Finally, by focusing our efforts on a single web based product we can provide the attention and resources to really make the experience shine. Web-based development is efficient and lean so you can expect new functionality to come fast and furious.
And rather than settling for a lowest common denominator approach, we plan to create style sheets and Javascript dedicated to each platform. This will provide an experience enhanced for each mobile browser. We've started by optimizing for BlackBerry devices but would love to hear from you about which platforms we should be polishing next.
If this sounds interesting and you want to chime in on the future of TweetDeck, we'd love to hear from you. Testing is about to begin and if you head over to http://support.tweetdeck.com/entries/174214 and sign up we'll add you to the testing list. We're excited to roll this out with your support.
