TweetDeck users will soon have a choice: Use the web-based version, the Mac or PC apps, or use something else to access Twitter.
Twitter announced today that all of the older versions of TweetDeck will be shut down in early May:
To continue to offer a great product that addresses your unique needs, we’re going to focus our development efforts on our modern, web-based versions of TweetDeck. To that end, we are discontinuing support for our older apps: TweetDeck AIR, TweetDeck for Android and TweetDeck for iPhone. They will be removed from their respective app stores in early May and will stop functioning shortly thereafter. We’ll also discontinue support for our Facebook integration.
These are both TweetDeck for Android and iPhone, so effectively, easy mobile access to TweetDeck is lost. TweetDeck for AIR means the loss for some of desktop support, but TweetDeck made a point of saying that both its Mac and PC standalone apps will continue to be supported.
TweetDeck has been sort of the power-users’ preferred official app thanks to numerous features that Twitter’s official apps (and Twitter.com) are lacking.
Impacting Twitter’s decision is the fact that the company is retiring version 1.0 of the Twitter API, which is what the old versions of TweetDeck rely on. Twitter is choosing the path of least resistance — shutting them down — rather than upgrading each version to work with the new API.
Personal suggestion for soon-to-be-homeless old TweetDeck users that use iOS devices: Give Tweetbot a try, even if it does cost more than you’re probably used to paying for a Twitter client. It doesn’t have all of Tweetdeck’s features, but it’s pretty close — multi-column support, particularly. And it has a lot of features TweetDeck doesn’t.
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