TweetDeck, the most popular third-party Twitter client on the market today, just got a major update. TweetDeck now features support for Twitter lists and Twitter's new geolocation feature, as well as a LinkedIn column and optional support for Twitter's new retweet function. Users who prefer to use old-style retweets can still use these as well. For now, TweetDeck geolocation feature doesn't allow you to update your location from the desktop. This feature will soon be part of TweetDeck's iPhone app, which will be updated in the next few weeks.]]>
Interface Tweaks
All of this added functionality could have cluttered up TweetDeck's interface, but the team decided to redesign parts of the interface. A single '+' button at the top of the app now opens up a new dialog that allows you to add lists and Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn columns to your view. From there, you can also start new Twitter lists.
TweetDeck's Ian Dodsworth also told us that TweetDeck will soon be able to show its users composite profiles of TweetDeck users based on the social network profiles they have added to TweetDeck.
Auto-Updated Lists
As Twitter still restricts the number of calls a user can make to the Twitter API, TweetDeck's competitor Seesmic decided to have users update lists manually. In TweetDeck, lists will update automatically and you can set the frequency of these updates in the app's settings dialog.
TweetDeck also makes it easy to start new lists from existing lists, which is great if you want to extend somebody else's list with your own picks, for example. TweetDeck will also suggest users for a list. We are not quite sure how TweetDeck makes these suggestions, but they seem to be based on the title of your group.
You can find a full lists of all the tweaks and new features in TweetDeck 0.32 here.
Battle of the Twitter Clients
The auto-updating lists currently give TweetDeck a slight lead over Seesmic, which introduced lists as a core feature of its desktop client a few weeks ago. Seesmic's new Seesmic for Windows, however, can now be extended with Firefox-like plugins. Because of this, Seesmic can now farm out a lot of development to third-party developers, and anybody can create a column for LinkedIn or any other social network.
According to social media monitoring service Sysomos, TweetDeck is currently the single most popular Twitter client after Twitter's own website. It took TweetDeck a while to release today's updates and the company surely lost some users to Seesmic in the meantime. This new update brings TweetDeck back on par with the competition, and even adds a number of new features — like the ability to clone lists — that its competitors don't offer (yet).
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