The newest test version of Tweetdeck now integrates your Twitter stream and your Facebook updates! If you’re not familiar with Tweetdeck, I’ve mentioned it a couple weeks ago in a blog post about how to keep up with your social networking without spending hours every day. In that post mentioned that I used Tweetdeck to help me keep up with the people I’m following on Twitter. The ability to group the people you’re following into categories was one of the things that initially attracted me to Tweetdeck. But it was still lacking some of the features that I liked in another Twitter tool that I used called Twirl, so I often bounced from one tool to the other depending on what I needed to do.
Well, earlier this week, the folks at Adobe (the creators of Tweetdeck) came out with a new test version of Tweetdeck that’s quickly made it my favorite Twitter tool.
Here are some of the features in this version of Tweetdeck
- It integrates with both your Twitter and your Facebook account, so you can monitor all of you Facebook friend updates as well as those on Twitter. You can even start a Facebook Chat through Tweetdeck.
- It has a search function built in so you can search for specific topics that people are twittering about. Plus you can save the search and monitor new tweets as they come in.
- You can easily reply, send direct messages, and retweet interesting tweets from the people you’re following by clicking a single button.
- You can read the individual profiles of the people you’re following including when they joined, their website address, and the last tweets that they sent.
- You can mark which tweets you’ve read.
- You still have the ability to group your Twitter followers in categories you define. It’s now easier to add new people to your groups by clicking on the [+] on one of their tweets.
- It now has link shortening tools built in (yay!) and you can choose from a ton of different services like Snipurl, is.gd, bit.ly, tinyurl, and more.
- It also has pop-up notifications. So if you have your Tweetdeck window minimized in the background, you’ll get a pop-up update and sound alert every time you get new tweets.
- It’s also has integrated with some other Twitter services like Twitscoop (what topics are hot on Twitter now), 12seconds (12 second video posting), StockTwits (stock information via Twitter), and TwitPic (posting photos on Twitter).
Now because Tweetdeck arranges all of your information in multiple columns, it still takes up a lot of space on your screen. Plus, it’s important to remember that this is just a test version of the software, which means that there still may be some bugs in it. So far I haven’t run into any problems, but always be aware of the fact that test software isn’t going to be perfect.
If you want to check out Tweetdeck, visit the website at: http://www.tweetdeck.com/beta/
