Twitter reaffirms commitment to Tweetdeck with improvements to web apps

Twitter announced a variety of improvements for the Tweetdeck apps for web and Chrome on Tuesday, adding new options for users to filter the content appearing in Tweetdeck columns. The news demonstrates that Twitter is still interested in supporting updates and changes to Tweetdeck, rather than shutting it down or discouraging growth as it’s done with many other third-party Twitter clients.

Twitter confirmed its acquisition of Tweetdeck in May 2011, but it was unclear if the company would continue to update Tweetdeck or kill it altogether, as my colleague Mathew Ingram wrote at the time of the deal. Twitter’s relationship with third-party client developers has been become fairly fraught, as those clients attempt to replicate the Twitter experience outside of the web, which has only gained importance as Twitter has worked to make money on the web experience through advertising. This past summer, Twitter issued a warning to developers that third-party clients would be forced to adhere to a new system of rules for using tweets that could limit their growth.

Tweetdeck users of both the Chrome and web apps will now have more options to change the content they view and filters they apply. A Tweetdeck blog post explained the updates:

“Today we’re releasing a powerful set of column filters for the TweetDeck web and Chrome apps. These allow you to show or exclude specific words and phrases from a TweetDeck column –– especially useful when you want to focus on a particular element of a column. You can also choose to view only Tweets that contain media (images and/or video). This turns any of your existing columns into a media column, making it very easy to scan content and find what you’re looking for.”

The company notes in the blog post that it’s introduced a variety of updates to Tweetdeck recently, including real-time updating of tweets in columns, keyboard shortcuts and search improvements, among others. In October 2012, Tweetdeck released visual updates to its product, including updated colors and fonts for a variety of platforms including web, Chrome, Mac and Windows.

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