Kayvon Beykpour said in a March interview with The Verge that Twitter does know TweetDeck still exists and the company is working on an overhaul “from the ground up.” Today, Twitter posted a single image of the reworked app, explaining that it represents a preview going into testing with a few “randomly selected” people from the US, Canada, and Australia. If you can’t wait to see it yourself, Jane Manchun Wong explains how you can opt into the test right now with a simple browser tweak.
In a tweet today, Beykpour said that new features in testing for TweetDeck “include a full Tweet Composer, new advanced search features, new column types, and a new way to group columns into clean workspaces.” Twitter may have more reasons to hope the upgrades are a hit — rumors have said the company is considering charging for it in the future.
To try out the “new TweetDeck,” just follow Jane’s instructions. Open TweetDeck in your browser, then go to Developer Tools (if you’re using Chrome), open the console tab, and copy and paste this HTML:
document.cookie = “tweetdeck_version=beta”
Then hit enter and reload the page.
TweetDeck powers The Verge’s newsroom, and many others, so any changes are likely to meet a skeptical audience of power users, but so far it’s tough to find the improvements. The app’s appeal is in its column views that haven’t changed much over the last decade, but the layout in the screenshot they released looks very different from what we’re used to, and in the left column a button promotes decks to sort various content types. Otherwise, it looks a lot more like the standard Twitter view, which isn’t why I use TweetDeck.
Jay Peters has played around with the preview using the method above and configured a setup that’s more similar to the current iteration of TweetDeck. In a series of tweets on Tuesday afternoon, Twitter assured users their favorite TweetDeck features aren’t going away, while this FAQ explains that those invited to the test will be able to copy over their current setups to the new TweetDeck.
