Most of my Twitter pals who talk or write about TweetDeck have nothing but good things to say about the application. I’m afraid you can’t put me in that same camp — at least not yet.

While TweetDeck has plenty going for it — multiple columns, easy retweeting, ability to create groups, features for monitoring multiple search terms — I still find it too buggy and inflexible to use regularly. I’ve come back to the application with a fresh set of eyes on three or four occasions over the last few months, and each time I find it wanting.

Here are my main complaints with TweetDeck:

  • While multiple columns are helpful, I want to have control over resizing those columns horizontally or vertically however I wish. At the moment, I have some 10 columns I’d like to monitor at once, but there’s only room on my screen for 4.5 of them.
  • The groups feature would be a real bonus — if it worked properly. I spent a frustrating hour yesterday trying to build a group of my 25-plus LiveWorld co-workers on Twitter, but ran into fits when I couldn’t find a dozen of them in the supposed comprehensive checkbox list (see screenshot below) of all the people I’m following. And as for doing a manual search in TweetDeck to fill in the gaps, as was suggested by one friend? Painfully slow. I gave up.
    Update: Some further digging reveals that TweetDeck intentionally doesn’t display all of one’s friends initially, because of limitations from Twitter’s API.
  • The Tweet Box has a knack for not recording my spacing between words, forcing me to delete and retype far too often.

screenshot of TweetDeck group creation

I’m not meaning to get all cranky on you in this post. Really. TweetDeck’s prospects are actually promising, and I have it on good authority that founder Iain Dodsworth is working hard to address the limitations and bugs that I and others have raised.

So improvements are coming. But for now, I’m sticking with Twitter.com as my main gateway to Twitter. It’s served me well so far!

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