TweetDeck’s New Chrome App: Awesome & Set to Get Better in Days

Google Chrome announced the availability of its new web app store today, which means web applications are easier to ever to access and can leverage HTML5 features like local storage mixed with web pages.

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.

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There are a number of things I love about this new app. So far, they include:

• 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.

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