Twitter is actively working on a “major overhaul” of its TweetDeck platform, which allows it to organize lists and feeds in easy-to-read vertical lines, and plans to share more about the project publicly later this year, said head of product Kayvon Beykpour in a interview with The Verge published Tuesday.
TweetDeck, as one of the oldest and originally third-party account management applications for the platform, has not seen much in the way of design or major feature changes in recent years. The app was launched 12 years ago and was acquired by Twitter in 2011, and is more or less the same vertical grid viewer for its various Twitter feeds as it started. Mainly, Twitter transferred new functions added to its main website and mobile applications, keeping the main design of TweetDeck relatively static.
This seems to be changing. Beykpour and the product team acknowledge that they have “not given much love to TweetDeck recently” and are actively working on a new TweetDeck that they plan to show later this year. It is part of a broader effort to improve Twitter’s developer tools and repair its relationship with application makers, the latter being a longstanding dispute between Twitter and the broader software development community. (Beykpour’s response does not specify whether the new TweetDeck will be released this year or simply be viewed by the public.)
Here is Beykpour’s complete response to TweetDeck:
Nilay Patel: The VergeThe company’s newsroom works on TweetDeck.
Beykpour: Totally. And we haven’t been giving much love to TweetDeck recently. This is about to change; we’ve been working on a major redesign of TweetDeck, and it’s something we’re looking forward to sharing publicly this year. And this is just one example of a service owned and operated by Twitter in which we will continue to invest. We, too, in the past five years, I think, have not given much love to our developer ecosystem. A lot of reasons for that, some mistakes that we had made in the past, and also a kind of prioritization. We are also changing that; over the past year and a half, we’ve really increased our commitment and follow-up to just innovating around the API again, putting the API back on par with our own internal APIs that we use to build functionality.
I think we have a lot of confidence to win back with the developers, as we’ve made a lot of mistakes in the past, but it’s something we’re actively investing in. We hope to allow developers to really build incredible things around the Twitter ecosystem. One of the reasons why Twitter is where it is today is because the developers are doing cool things that we never would have thought of doing. And this is something that we are trying to do more of, not to stray from. More to come about that too.
It is not clear whether this new TweetDeck would feature an updated visual design, entirely new features or both. It is also up for debate whether Twitter plans to eventually charge money for TweetDeck; one Bloomberg report last month said the company was considering a premium version of TweetDeck for which it could charge a subscription fee.
Whatever the shape of the new app, it will be a breath of fresh air for longtime TweetDeck users (myself included) who would like, at the very least, a new coat of paint.