Ten Things That Drive Me Nuts About #TweetDeck

If you use Twitter, and you’ve moved beyond just a few followers, you’ve inevitably run into the need to better manage your timeline. There are a few ways to do this, and your Twitter home page has recently been upgraded to feature trends and searches. There are also third-party applications and sites that utilize the Twitter API, and allow you to do things that your twitter page can’t do, like organizing conversations, grouping tweeps that you follow, managing tweets that you’ve already seen, direct messages, etc.

One of the first third-party desktop apps that came out was TweetDeck. Despite the title of this post, TweetDeck has been a really great way to do these things (except for organizing conversations; it doesn’t do that, unfortunately). I didn’t get why I’d use it until I started following more than about fifty tweeps on Twitter. After that it became a necessity.

I needed to group the tweeps that I followed by relevance. Since then, I haven’t unfollowed anyone because of post frequency (though I have unfollowed because they were boring). Without TweetDeck, I wouldn’t be able to follow people like Wil Wheaton (@wilw), who post with high frequency. I would also be overwhelmed by the aggregate volume of NASA missions, all of which I follow. The ability to post my Facebook status from TweetDeck is nice too; especially when I want it to be the same as a tweet (or not).

Despite its incredible utility and simplicity, there are user interface elements in TweetDeck that just drive me up the wall. These are just UI peeves; stability and robustness hasn’t been a problem for me, so I’m not getting into that here.

1. The tweet box should clear when you hit the ‘Esc’ key. Every decent chat client out there does this, and this is an app that produces similarly-sized messages. I shouldn’t have to select the whole line and hit ‘Delete’ or ‘Backspace’. I can, at least, triple-click the text and get all of it at once.
2. ‘Tab’ should not move the focus to the tweet columns. There is nothing in a column that you can do with the keyboard, so why is it getting focus? The tab focus should only stick to those elements that make sense to manipulate with the keyboard, and they should highlight in a more noticeable way.
3. ‘Marking’ should be the same as ‘clearing’. One of the things that makes TD useful is the ability to mark a tweet as read, and then clear it. However, I don’t ever feel the need to mark anything and keep it visible. It would be much simpler just to mark it as read and then have it go away. Keep the “mark all as seen” button, but maybe there could be a per-column “show hidden tweets” toggle instead of the current “clear seen tweets” button. Oh, and make the tweet disappear from all columns. And do away with that stupid little dot to mark a tweet. Make it a nice, clickable ‘X’.
4. Marking behavior is inconsistent and buggy. When I mark a tweet, I expect it to look and behave marked in all columns. It doesn’t. I can understand when this happens with the all friends feed and searches, because they come from different sources, but this shouldn’t happen between groups or between a group and the all friends feed. All such tweets come from the API, so they should behave the same way. Instead, if you mark a tweet, it doesn’t look marked in another column, but it will clear away when you hit “clear seen tweets.” Again, if the marking/clearing thing were simplified, it would be easier.
5. Why isn’t one click sufficient to activate hypertext? This drives me nuts. Is the whitespace in text transparent to mouse clicks as well as background color?
6. Drag-and-drop would be really nice. I’d like to drag text. I’d like to drag tweeps to copy them or move them into groups. I’d like to drag a tweet into the tweet box to retweet it. I’d like to drag columns to reorder them.
7. Filters, searches and groups should be persistent. That, or at least recent ones cached. Then this nonsense of warning about permanent deletion can be done away with.
8. Just pop up the damn dialog, and don’t blur the window underneath. I might still like to read what’s down there, instead of getting an eye test. Oh, and let me move the damn thing!
9. Give me a right-click context menu. That goes for everything that you can interact with. I want a right-click menu for @-names, so I can follow the person. I want to right-click to get the options for a tweet. It’s enabled for hyperlinks, please set it up for the other elements.
10. Why can’t I put non-alphanumeric characters like ‘/’ and ‘&’ in group names? Huh? Why would this even be a restriction? This makes no sense to me.

Those are my gripes. They are not unique to me; many of the above have been reported already, and there are more issues yet that get under my skin, like the system tray behavior. Nevertheless, I’m still using TweetDeck and I understand that there is only one developer (the growing bug list might be reason enough to open-source the project, though). I’m still not dissatisfied with it enough to investigate other clients. That is, unless someone points one out that gives me conversation tracking and addresses all of the problems above.