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Tweetdeck is getting an update and we aren’t fans

Late on Tuesday afternoon Twitter announced that it was rolling out a preview of a “new and improved” Tweetdeck and many, including ourselves, are not pleased with the changes that have been made.

The preview is limited to users in the US, Canada and Australia for now but there is a way to test out the preview if you aren’t in those countries that we’ll get into in a moment.

First off, what did Twitter change? Well for one columns are borked. In our Tweetdeck we had columns for our personal profile, mentions, DMs and the same for the Hypertext Twitter account. This allows us to see messages and tweets at a glance and it’s one of the reasons we prefer Tweetdeck over Twitter.com.

The columns now look like new tabs containing individual elements of Twitter. For instance, we now have an Explore column, a column we have never had in Tweetdeck. Columns for Explore, Notifications and My Profile are hilariously out of proportion. In fact, it looks like Twitter just pasted the code for each of the pages on its website into these columns, looked at the result, said “We did a good job” and walked away.

The “new and improved” Tweetdeck. Orange blocks are edits made by Hypertext.

There are one or two things that Twitter has improved on such as being able to view a hashtag without creating an entire new column for that tag. That is as far as our praise goes though.

The UI seems off and and Notifications getting as much space as Harry Potter did under the stairs is hilarious to behold.

We mentioned being able to give this new Tweetdeck a try before the preview becomes officially available to you. Thanks to Jane Wong who found the code to activate the new version.

In Chrome (or a Chrome based browser) open Tweetdeck and open Developer Tools (Ctrl + Shift + I on PC) and then open the Console. Type in:

document.cookie = “tweetdeck_version=beta”

Hit enter and then reload the page and the new Tweetdeck should load. To disable it click the “Leave Tweetdeck Preview” button at the bottom left of the display or open the console again and type:

document.cookie = “tweetdeck_version=”

Hit enter and reload.

We’re not alone in our dislike of this update. In responses to Tweetdeck’s announcement in the tweet below users have said that the reason they use Tweetdeck is because it doesn’t look or function like the website in anyway. That includes not seeing advertising which is probably why Twitter wants to update Tweetdeck.

We’d also like to point to one of the best browser extensions available – Better Tweetdeck. The extension is available for all modern browsers and we could not imagine using Tweetdeck without it.

Unfortunately the future of this extension is now in the air because Twitter wants to fix something that isn’t broken seemingly in pursuit of serving adverts. Surely there is a better way to do that aside from ripping apart the foundations of the app.

In short Twitter, thanks, we hate the new Tweetdeck.

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