Last week at the ReadWriteWeb 2WAY Summit, our COO Sean Ammirati spoke to Betaworks CEO John Borthwick. Betaworks has funded and incubated a number of companies in the real-time Web market, such as TweetDeck, Bit.ly and Chartbeat.

Partly the answer to that is the health of the startup ecosystem. Betaworks spotted the trend of the real-time Web early and helped developed some key startups in this area, particularly third party Twitter services. So Sean asked Borthwick what he thinks of the market currently. Borthwick replied that he doesn't think the market is in a bubble. He noted that companies with very large valuations have big revenue: Facebook, GroupOn, Zynga and even Twitter. So he thinks those valuations are justified.

Another key is when startups should pivot, to capitalize on market opportunities or changes. According to Borthwick, user adoption and engagement are two key metrics for companies when deciding whether to pivot or not. He also talked about "right-sizing your business" if necessary, in other words don't over-reach and raise a lot of capital if it's not feasible to reach the mainstream.

iPad magazine apps is an example of an emerging market that Betaworks is at the early stage of exploring. News.me is a personalized magazine from the Betaworks stable, competing head on with Flipboard. Borthwick explained that News.me is both an iPad app and an email subscription service. With the iPad app, they charge 99c per week and pay that revenue to publishers (they have done deals with 650 publishers, including ReadWriteWeb).

News.me isn't just another Flipboard copycat. Whereas Flipboard is a social magazine, News.me is a curated reading experience. It works by showing different views of what people are reading. It isn't based on what a person has read, but what they are likely to read according to who they follow and interact with on Twitter.

It remains to be seen if News.me can successfully compete against Flipboard and other online reading services, but it's a great example of how Betaworks pushes the boundaries when releasing new Web products.

You can see the entire conversation here, courtesy of Livestream:

If you wanted to shorten a link within Twitter.com before, you had to use a link shortening service like Bit.ly or TinyURL and paste the link into the "New Tweet" field. Twitter will now truncate URLs that are longer than 13 characters and give them a t.co ID (Twitter's URL shortening handle) while keeping the original URL intact so you know where the link originated.

Security was also on Twitter's mind. All links shortened through Twitter.com will be checked against the company's database of malicious URLS. Twitter will shorten URLs to 19 characters so that they will contain the primary stem of the link that is being shortened. One of the primary problems with short links on Twitter is that third-party links from services like Bit.ly could come from anywhere. Many publishers use custom or vanity URL shorteners to avoid the problem. Google also allows publishers to shorten URLs through Goo.gl.

There are also spammers to worry about. Last week it was reported by security company Symantec that spammers are creating new and sophisticated ways to use public URL shorteners to redirect their phishing targets to malicious websites.

This is another rollout of a core feature by Twitter that was filled primarily by a third-party service. Last week the company launched hosted photo sharing, going after the likes of TwitPic and YFrog along with better search functions. This week it is URL shortening. What core service will Twitter unveil next week?

This may be one of the first features that Twitter is implementing from its acquisition of TweetDeck. The Twitter desktop client has shortened URLs within the "New Tweet" field almost since its inception.

I asked Twitter point blank this morning "Will Twitter remove Facebook from Tweetdeck?" My reply came from Jodi Olson, Corporate Communications at Twitter: "Short answer is, we'll continue to invest in the TweetDeck that you know and love." Ok then, that seems straightforward enough, while still maintaining that typical maddening feel of non-communication from one of the world's leading communication companies. You're still 58 characters short of 140 there, Jodi, but as I wrote back: I'm going to take that to mean that 3rd party networks are staying in.

None the less, it's good to hear some kind of statement from Twitter HQ voicing support for continued integration of those services. Of course it wasn't the most strongly worded commitment, but I think it was widely assumed that Facebook integration in particular was likely to go out the window.

If Twitter's really comfortable with integration of third party services into its official clients, though, then let's get this party started. All kinds of interesting things could come of that. Perhaps Tweetdeck is where they will happen first.

Entries included "Quick Send Tweet" that allows you to email tweets to yourself for later browsing, a Gmail notification box and a cool Android hack called "Tweet-As-You-Go" that uses a smartphone camera to view a live background on the compose tweet screen. Check out the entries after the jump and vote for them on TweetDeck's blog.

Tweet-As-You-Go

Pictured right.

"Don't stop tweeting, just because you are walking," wrote Richard Barley, TweetDeck's community manager in the Hack Day blog post. "You can see where you're going thanks to the live camera-view background on the compose screen. Thanks to some accelerometer trickery, the camera view fades in as you start to walk and fades out when you stop, so you don't even need to enable/disable it."

Unicode Art

A compose-box for ChromeDeck that allows users to add smiley faces, upside-down text and more.

Native ChromeDeck

Built from the Chrome Tweetdeck codebase, it is a native application for Mac, Windows and Linux with Growl notifications.

Deck.ly Expansion for Twitter.com

This one is probably never going to see the light of day, especially now that Twitter owns Tweetdeck. Deck.ly is the feature in TweetDeck that allows users to go over the 140-character limit with a link to a page that shows the full Tweet. Call me a traditionalist, but I think that Twitter would not be quite the same without the strict 140-character rule.

Gmail Notifications

A feature that has often been requested, according to Barley. See Gmail in your inbox column with a link that takes you to the Web.

Quick Send Tweet

I am not sure I would ever use this one, but it made it to the Hack Day highlights. It allows you to email tweets to yourself for offline browsing. The developer in the video says he uses it to see Tweets when he is on the subway.

Since it added Facebook support in March 2009, TweetDeck has aimed to be a central app from which people can interact with all of their social networks. That's a potentially massive commercial opportunity for a startup. Imagine being able to control your Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn and other social services using the one interface. That's precisely what TweetDeck does right now, only it's not quite fully functional yet and people haven't gotten used to the concept. Unfortunately, the acquisition by Twitter will put an end to TweetDeck's ambition and we'll have to wait for another startup to chase that Holy Grail. Here's how this all played out and our guess at what will happen next...

TweetDesk was developed by Iain Dodsworth from England, at first as a desktop app for Twitter powered by Adobe AIR. TweetDeck was released as a public beta in July, 2008. "I originally built TweetDeck to solve my problem of being overwhelmed with Twitter," Dodsworth later told tech blogger Louis Gray.

ReadWriteWeb reviewed TweetDeck when it launched. Frederic Lardinois noted at the time:

The major difference between TweetDeck and other Twitter clients like Twhirl, Snitter, Twitteriffic, and AlertThingy, is that it displays more than one column of information at a time. In TweetDeck, you can define columns for your replies, numerous searches in Summize, as well as groups. You can define up to 10 different columns.

One of TweetDeck's defining features on launch was its ability to create groups of Twitter users, to better allow you to filter your Twitter experience. Dodsworth explained to Louis Gray that "segmenting my friends out to a separate area was the catalyst for the creation of groups (a first for twitter applications afaik) and required a new approach to the UI." This UI was inspired by financial dashboards, which Dodsworth had "been involved in building and evolving before TweetDeck."

2009: TweetDeck Expands Beyond Twitter; to Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn & More

Although TweetDeck was originally conceived as an application to manage your Twitter reading and writing, Dodsworth soon saw the potential to expand it to other social media services. Dodsworth wrote in mid-09 that he had "a bigger vision [for TweetDeck], to become a new browser for the real-time Web."

To fuel that ambition, Dodsworth took seed funding from Betaworks in January 2009. We profiled Betaworks in September last year - it's a seed-stage investor in a range of real-time web companies, such as Tumblr, Twitterfeed, Superfeedr and Songkick.

In March 2009 TweetDeck added its first integration with Facebook. It featured a new column showing status updates from your friends, along with the ability to update your Facebook status from within TweetDeck.

In June 2009, TweetDeck went mobile with the announcement of an iPhone app. It belatedly launched an Android version in August 2010. Version 2 of the iPhone app followed in April 2011.

In September 2009, TweetDeck added "full powered Facebook" support. That featured the ability to view Facebook photos, videos, links, wall posts, comments and more in TweetDeck. At the same time, TweetDeck added MySpace to the app. LinkedIn was added in November that year, in-app YouTube and Flickr support in February 2010, and Google Buzz and Foursquare in May 2010.

As well as expanding its support of services other than Twitter, TweetDeck continued to adapt to whatever changes Twitter made. For example, TweetDeck added support for Twitter lists in October 2009.

At the end of the year, ReadWriteWeb named TweetDeck one of its Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2009.

2010-2011: More Apps (iPad, Android, ChromeDeck) & Pushing Twitter's Boundaries

2010 was mostly focused on expanding the list of devices and platforms that TweetDeck covered.

TweetDeck for iPad arrived in April 2010, making "full use of the iPad's large screen size and gesture-based Multi-Touch navigation."

Another milestone was the first browser-based version of TweetDeck, with the launch of ChromeDeck in December 2010. As the name suggests, it brought TweetDeck to Google's Chrome browser. The beta of TweetDeck Web was released in April 2011, bringing TweetDeck to other web browsers.

Also in 2011, TweetDeck turned its attention to pushing the boundaries of what Twitter offers. TweetDeck launched a feature called Deck.ly in January this year, which allows users to post tweets that are longer than the traditional 140 character limit. It's been arguably the most controversial thing TweetDeck has done, but it may well be something that Twitter eventually adopts - whether or not it acquires TweetDeck.

It should be noted that TweetDeck has had technical road bumps along the way, particularly dealing with Twitter's API limits. There have also been issues with the app itself, particularly problems with large spikes in CPU and memory usage. But overall, the product has been one of the best examples of innovation in the social media era of the Web.

TweetDeck's Search for The Holy Grail

By its 2nd anniversary in July 2010, TweetDeck had firmly established itself as the leading consumer app for Twitter. At that stage the desktop TweetDeck app had been downloaded over 15 million times and the iPhone version over 2.5 million times.

To this day Facebook and the other non-Twitter services are still a peripheral feature of TweetDeck. Most people use TweetDeck primarily to manage their Twitter account. The Facebook integration is merely a handy, probably not well used, feature.

Nevertheless, as early as March 2009 TweetDeck was clearly building a product with a lot of promise. I'd argue that TweetDeck was building the Holy Grail of web apps in the social networking era: a single place to interact with all of your different social networks and social media services.

In July 2010, TweetDeck stated that its goal was to become a "true multi-stream" service. It claimed that "the intersection of social networks, can be infinitely greater than the sum of its parts. [...] TweetDeck should be more about what your friends are saying rather than the networks they are using to say it."

Twitter: Oh No You Don't...

It's a nice dream, but Twitter won't want that reality to happen. That's because to Twitter, the networks that people are using does matter. Specifically, Twitter doesn't want Facebook to usurp it for real-time updates.

It's possible that Twitter will require TweetDeck to drop support of other services entirely. More likely, Twitter will allow TweetDeck to keep developing its central social networking hub - but it will find ways to ensure that Twitter remains front and center in the app. That isn't a big change from what TweetDeck is now, because as noted above most TweetDeck users still use the app primarily for Twitter. However, it will certainly restrict the future TweetDeck.

If TweetDeck had continued to be independent, or even if UberMedia had succeeded in its earlier bid for the product, we (the users) would eventually have gotten a much more expansive TweetDeck. Probably a more exciting product too. Definitely it would've been one with the potential to change the Web ecosystem.

There's no way that will happen if Twitter buys TweetDeck, as seems likely to be confirmed any day now. That's sad for Web innovation.

Last month, rumors hit the Web that TweetDeck, the multi-columned, much-preferred desktop client of hardcore users, had been acquired by Twitter. Today, TechCrunch is reporting that the deal has gone through, with Twitter snapping up the company for $40 to $50 million.

While we don't want to be melodramatic, we're afraid that this deal could be the beginning of the end and here's why.

The first, and most surface-level concern, is that Twitter will simply buy TweetDeck and shut it down. It wouldn't be the first time that a big company has snatched up the competition to merely put it out of business. And Twitter has a number of reasons to do just that.

In March, Twitter director of platform Ryan Sarver advised developers to quit building clients, as this was an area that the company intended on moving into in an effort to give users a uniform experience. Allowing users to view tweets alongside Facebook and LinkedIn updates, as well as sending tweets longer than 140 characters using Deck.ly, certainly doesn't sound like "uniform experience" to us, which brings us to our second point.

Where Art Thou, Facebook & LinkedIn Integration?

TweetDeck goes beyond Twitter, allowing users to track their Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Myspace and Google Buzz accounts all on one dashboard. Even if Twitter allows TweetDeck to continue on as a desktop client, there's no way Twitter is keeping the ability to track other services in the now-Twitter-owned client, right?

Right.

A N00bified TweetDeck Wouldn't Be TweetDeck at All

As we mentioned before, TweetDeck is generally the Twitter client of choice for the hardcore Twitter user, but this hasn't exactly been Twitter's focus, as of late. The general push for Twitter has been to portray the service as something that's good for anyone and everyone. TweetDeck is the opposite of a tool for new users. It has complicated settings and allows the end user to customize the experience greatly, setting up filters, custom columns and more.

Could they be making a play at being able to own the advanced user experience? Sure. More likely, the company is simply playing defense against UberMedia, which had reportedly bought TweetDeck last February. The deal would have given UberMedia control of nearly 20% of the Twitter client ecosystem, something Twitter certainly wasn't keen on.

What Happens If Twitter Kills TweetDeck?

When the news first hit about Twitter potentially acquiring TweetDeck last month, Mrinal Desai wrote a guest post on TechCrunch discussing the various reasons that Twitter will kill TweetDeck upon completing the purchase. Desai points to many of the same issues discussed here and comes to a singular conclusion: "If Twitter does end up buying Tweetdeck, the product as we know it is a goner."

But what happens then? Will Tweetdeck's many dedicated users simply switch over to Twitter.com? Would Twitter force a Web-only experience and bring TweetDeck's Chrome client to its Web experience? Or would Twitter turn TweetDeck into a pared down, paid product in an attempt to bring in revenue from its most hardcore users?

We don't know, but we know one thing - a Twitter acquisition of TweetDeck does not look like a promising move for the end user, but we're hoping for the best.

For those who use TweetDeck on your desktop computer, you'll probably agree that that means a focus on columns. The standard columns are still available: Mentions, DMs, Lists and so on. But now you can also have combined columns (adding your Home, Me, and Inbox columns so you can see updates from multiple Twitter accounts you might have). You can also customize the appearance of feeds in your columns.

The newly updated app also contains support for Deck.ly, which gives you the ability to send and read updates that are longer than 140 characters. As with the desktop client, you can choose to turn this feature off.

Just like the new Twitter client we wrote about a few weeks ago Tweetbot, this updated TweetDeck contains a number of new gestures: pinch inward on a column, for example, to acces column settings or tap the status bar to jump to the top of a column.

And as with Tweetbot, there's an emphasis here on tracking Twitter conversations, giving you the ability when you view a tweet to see the related discussion around it.

These features all seem to make sense and are vast improvements over the older TweetDeck version. It's certainly a sign too that there is still innovation happening around third-party Twitter clients, despite Twitter's insistence that companies do something else rather than build them. Will the new TweetDeck app replace the official iPhone app on my phone? I'm not sure, but as as someone who relies on it on the desktop, I'm willing to give it a try.

TweetDeck says it's working on an update to the iPad app too, which should be available in the next couple of weeks.

Popular Twitter client TweetDeck, previously reported to have been acquired by Ubermedia, is now said to be in talks with Twitter for an acquisition that would nearly double its former $30 million price tag.

The Wall Street Journal reports today that Twitter is "in advanced talks" to buy the client for around $50 million, according to "people familiar with the matter."

The Wall Street Journal points to the close relationship between the two companies, noting the appearance of ads on TweetDeck as part of a revenue sharing agreement - something that Twitter has reserved for few clients.

What would a TweetDeck acquisition look like? When Twitter bought beloved mobile Twitter app Tweetie a year ago, the app quickly became the default Twitter app for iPhone. With TweetDeck - an Adobe Air desktop application - would Twitter suddenly offer a default desktop application? Or would it adopt technology from TweetDeck such as Deck.ly, the system that allows TweetDeck users to send messages with a length greater than 140 characters?

What does Twitter have to say about all this? "We don't comment on rumors. We don't provide off-the-record background on rumors. We don't wink twice or release puffs of smoke abt rumors," the company tweeted. TweetDeck founder Iain Dodsworth also did not respond.

We covered the TweetDeck Chrome application back in December and found a number of things to love about it, including its support for HTML5 and drag-and-drop columns, its integrated inbox and replies section and its Foursquare column showing your friends' check-ins. Others clearly loved it, too - TweetDeck says the app is the most popular one in the Google Web Store.

However, we didn't have access to pop-up notifications, TweetDeck groups or streaming support at launch, which made it a little less useful than the desktop version at the time. Today's new cross-platform Web app still does not support streaming, the company notes. That means if you need speed, the desktop app is still your best bet.

For now, the beta is limited to a select number of users, but it will open up to more over time.

To get access, users can sign up to test the new site here: http://www.tweetdeck.com/webbeta. You'll need to specify what Web browser and version you currently use, so be armed with that information when applying.

The most prominent third party Twitter client, TweetDeck, recently introduced a "long post" feature called Deck.ly, which brings those questions to the fore. Deck.ly allows Twitter users to post messages longer than the traditional 140 character limit. In this post I'll argue that Twitter itself will probably soon follow and expand beyond 140 characters. Indeed, it will need to if it's to continue expanding into the mainstream.

Twitter No Longer About Constraints

This is clearly an experimental feature introduced by TweetDeck - indeed they're still tweaking it. However I believe it's a pointer to the future: Twitter will expand its self-imposed character limitation in order to make its service easier to understand for consumers.

Real-time public messaging has become a huge trend over the past couple of years. Two services have come to dominate this trend: Facebook and Twitter. Facebook's status updates are the backbone of its social networking service. But it's been Twitter that has captured the imagination of media and public figures for real-time messaging. Partly that's because Facebook is essentially a closed system and so you won't see CNN or Kanye West's status updates (for example) unless you're inside Facebook's website. However it's also because Twitter had a limitation of 140 characters right from the start, a figure that made it necessary to compose short, to-the-point status updates.

Twitter started out with 'What are you doing?' as its incentivizing message for users. In November 2009, it became 'What's happening?'. That helped broaden Twitter's usage from "I'm eating breakfast" type messages to people tweeting about current news events, media they're consuming, topics they're interested in, and much more.

That Extra Click: The User Experience Issue

As noted, TweetDeck's new "long post" feature enables users to send messages longer than 140 characters. However there is a significant user experience issue with that, in that it often introduces an extra click for the user. A lot of Twitter's beauty as a consumer of tweets is that you can scan a bunch of tweets in one go.

But that UX paradigm had already been challenged by the gradual increase in multimedia links. Many Twitter users now post links to photos, video, blog posts, Foursquare check-ins, Facebook updates, and much more. Users need to click to see that extra content.

When Twitter launched its re-design in March last year, it adjusted to this increase of multimedia by enabling users of Twitter.com (still how the vast majority of people consume Twitter content) to view photos and video within Twitter's website. It was a relatively small, but significant, step to lessen the burden of viewing multimedia content within Twitter.

Third party clients like TweetDeck also allow users to view photos and video in a pop-up box inside the app. TweetDeck offers a similar functionality for Deck.ly messages that are longer than can be contained in a double cell. It pops up a box within the app, meaning that users don't need to go outside of TweetDeck to view the content.

It seems only a matter of time before Twitter enables users to view 'long tweets' within Twitter.com, in the same way that users can view videos and photos within the site.

Will Twitter Producers Pollute Twitter With Long Tweets?

While Twitter is positioning itself these days as more of a media consumption service, with the expectation that many more people read Twitter than write to it, the tone of the service will continue to be set by users who actively tweet. If Twitter drops the 140 character limitation, I think Twitter producers will adjust and only post longer tweets occasionally. Twitter will need to monitor that somehow, but - barring a drastic change in user behavior - Twitter users won't stop producing short tweets just because long ones become available to them. They'll use the long tweets sparingly, because they've been habituated into doing short tweets.

As for new users, Twitter will need to effectively convey in their marketing that Twitter is ideal for short-form real-time messaging. Indeed without a character limitation, Twitter will actually be easier to promote to mainstream users. It will remove an extra barrier for people to start using Twitter.

Other Languages Already Send Long Messages on Twitter

Another thing to consider that in some languages other than English, 140 characters allows for much longer updates than English users are used to. In Chinese for example, a 140 character tweet can produce a long message.

Noted Chinese artist, human rights activist and Twitter user Ai Weiwei explained in March last year that even though Twitter has a 140-character limit, Twitter users in China can easily express in-depth thoughts because the Chinese language allows Twitter users to express 140 words on Twitter and not just 140 characters.

Consider this tweet that Ai Weiwei wrote today. It easily fits in the 140 character limitation in Chinese, but the English translation is about 275 characters over that 140 character limit.

Twitter Needs to Expand Beyond 140 Characters to Continue Growing

I'm not minimizing the UX issues that Twitter will face when it expands beyond its core 140 character limit. But I do believe it's just a matter of time before it widens the character limit. There's no reason for Twitter to be constrained anymore, especially when the largest Internet using country on earth (China) already accommodates much longer tweets than are possible in English. Of course Twitter is banned in China and can only be used with software that routes around The Great Firewall, but still my point is valid.

Twitter is a public real-time messaging service which has gone mainstream. While it needs to keep the essential spirit of short-form messaging going, there are ways to do that in the design without using a character limitation.

If Twitter wants to continue its expansion into the mainstream, it needs to lose the 140-character limitation and just market itself as the world's leading 'real-time messaging service'.

What do you think, will Twitter soon expand beyond 140 characters like TweetDeck did?

The response from users has been mixed, to say the least. Some users are glad to be able to tweet without restriction on length, but many are frowning upon the service's violation of that sacred 140 character limit.

TweetDeck admits that the new feature has polarized its userbase, and the latest update to its app does allow you to turn off the feature entirely. It also plans to change the layout of these posts, as well as give you more control over what is and what isn't posted via Deck.ly.

The introduction of Deck.ly isn't simply about helping users Tweet longer. TweetDeck, which was recently acquired by Ubermedia, also notes that part of the motivation behind the Deck.ly experiment was to find a way to generate revenue from "TweetDeck-specific ad-targeting on the deck.ly landing pages." Indeed those 1,350,000 longer Deck.ly tweets have generated 1.5 million page views.

What are your thoughts on Deck.ly? Love it or hate it?

First reported on Friday by Techcrunch, the deal is pegged at around $30 million, making it the largest deal that Ubermedia has done in the Twitter ecosystem. Indeed, TweetDeck is the most popular Twitter client outside of Twitter's own applications. TweetDeck will join the Twitter apps now under the Ubermedia umbrella, including UberTwitter, Twidroid, and EchoFon.

For reference, last fall, Twitter published an update to its "evolving ecosystem," noting the popularity of the various apps in it. And other than Twitter's own apps (and the photo-sharing service Twitpic), TweetDeck is the most popular.

Ubermedia's Influence in the Evolving Twitter Ecosystem

So with this acquisition, three of the five top third-party apps are now owned by Ubermedia. As Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur notes, this means that roughly 20% of the tweets sent daily are sent via Ubermedia properties.

Le Meur says he wonders how Twitter feels about this control. But for his part, Le Meur seems positive about the acquisition news, even though Seesmic has been a competitor in the Twitter third-party app space. "There is room for both," writes LeMeur. "This is why it's good news for us, different focus, less competition. I might be wrong, but that's how I feel." Le Meur says that Seesmic's focus will be elsewhere, or rather the focus will be hybrid - on Twitter, on social networking, and on enterprise adoption.

Whither Third Party Developers?

Many third-party developers have had to "focus elsewhere," for a number of reasons: Twitter's own acquisition of third-party clients and its announcements about changing terms of service. Add to that, recent API changes - described by ReadWriteWeb's Mike Melanson in a recent article - and one has to wonder if the once great promise of opportunities for third-party developers in the Twitter ecosystem now seem far diminished as that ecosystem becomes consolidated in the hands of fewer and fewer players.

The first one I tried? My trusty Twitter client Tweetdeck. I've said for years that Twitter pays my rent as a journalist, but when I say that - these days that means TweetDeck too. So how does the new TweetDeck for Chrome look? It looks great. It feels great. It is great, if you've got casual Twitter needs. I'll be sticking with the desktop version, myself, but hopefully only for a few more days, as the TweetDeck crew adds features to the Chrome version.

• The HTML5 of it all moves so smooth, it's really attractive and responsive. That responsiveness is thanks in large part to the underlying code that all web apps like this will share.


• Re-ordering your columns is finally possible with drag and drop; sometimes it's the little things.


• An integrated inbox and replies section. You've got multiple accounts? Now see replies to all of them in one column. Thank you, TweetDeck! That will really help me cultivate conversations with multiple audiences, from multiple accounts. (Like @rwwgeo, the account I publish geotech Tweets from, but rarely remember to check replies to!)


• The Foursquare column now appears to display check-ins only from your actual Foursquare friends, instead of from all of your Twitter contacts. That makes it a very different experience, and much more to my liking.

The Bad News

I cannot use TweetDeck Chrome myself, and here is why:

• No pop-up notifications. I follow almost 8,000 people on Twitter, but there are 100 of them that live in a high-priority column in TweetDeck desktop. That column is set to pop-up in the corner of my screen, no matter what application I'm focused on. If I don't have that feature, then I don't use a Twitter client. It's an absolute deal breaker. My mortgage must be paid - and being handsome is not enough to do the job. I need TweetDeck pop-ups. This is possible - there is a Chrome API for desktop notifications, hopefully TweetDeck will integrate it soon. Good news - I just had a conversation with TweetDeck HQ and they said that column-by-column pop-up notifications will be added in the next few days! Wonderful!


• No old TweetDeck Groups, just Twitter lists you've built online. That's a shame.


• There are some little bugs that will need to be fixed, like the way it handles publishing to multiple accounts. It gets confused sometimes.


• It's not streaming, it's much slower than my desktop install. Maybe that's because I've changed the API call rate on my desktop version, but there are all kinds of things you can't do on this much simpler Chrome App. Like use a custom Bit.ly URL shortener.

The final verdict? If you're a casual Twitter user, you'll probably like TweetDeck Chrome a lot. If you're a speed-addicted power user, you'll want to stick to the desktop Adobe AIR version. For the next few days. Then we'll be free from the memory inefficiencies of AIR and hopefully have an even better TweetDeck experience in Chrome.

Today, those inline ads have been spotted on TweetDeck, a column-based Twitter client popular among power users.

When we first looked at these ads, we spoke with several people who predicted that they might be overlooked by the general population but that Twitter might experience some backlash from the techies and the social media purists. Today, we get to see what response these ads get when they show up on TweetDeck to people searching for news about the Web 2.0 Summit. The ads are targeting precisely those people that were said to potentially take issue with inline advertising.

Is it really that offensive to see inline advertising in this way? It's like saying "This conference tracking column is brought to you by... the conference you're attending." But is it the fact that it only shows up in a search column that makes it feel non-intrusive? What if, like HootSuite, TweetDeck starts getting inline advertisements on non-search columns?

In fact, this article right here might be the largest to-do you'll see about this today, but that's part of Twitter's strategy - roll out the ads and see how people react along the way. How will you react to inline advertising on TweetDeck's search columns?

[Thanks for the tip, Alex.]

TweetDeck for Android will handle more than Twitter, bringing the ability to post and receive updates from Facebook, Buzz and Foursquare as well.

We've tried to innovate as much as possible to deliver a smooth, clean experience while offering more power than any other social mobile client. Updates from all services are viewable in blended Home and Me columns so you can easily keep up-to-date without a lot of jumping around. We've also strived to take what has made TweetDeck a great Twitter client and provide that level of support to the other services.

Just yesterday, the company shared a couple of infographics to demonstrate just what they were up against in developing the Android app. If you don't feel like clicking, the long and short of it is a fragmented Android ecosystem, both in OS and device, that makes it difficult to read in a pie chart.

If you've been waiting for TweetDeck for Android to arrive, take a look at the intro video below and give it a download by searching for "TweetDeck" in the Android Market on your phone.