TweetDeck for AIR and mobile to shut down on May 7

Is this the beginning of the end for the Twitter dashboard?

Back in March, Twitter revealed that TweetDeck, which is Twitter's social media dashboard application, would be getting rid of its iPhone, Android, and AIR apps in March. At the time the company said that it was doing so to focus on its browser-based versions of the service, but no specific date was given for when these shutdowns would be occuring.

Now, Twitter has marked the date that TweetDeck goes to being a PC only service.

TweetDeck will be shutting down its AIR and mobile versions on May 7, it was announced in an updated blogpost Friday. Its Facebook integration will also be cut off that day as well.

"Doubling down on the TweetDeck web experience and discontinuing our app support is a reflection of where our TweetDeck power-users are going," TweetDeck said in the original announcement.

The Mac and PC versions of the service will still be in operation. While TweetDeck tried to sound optimistic about this move, saying, "We think these web and Chrome apps provide the best TweetDeck experience yet, and that they are the apps in which you’ll want to see us add new capabilities first," it hard to see this as anything but the first move toward getting rid of the application altogether.

Its an understatement to say that the tech world is going mobile. No company, or service, can afford to be PC only now. Twitter is obviously looking to push more users toward its iOS and Android app, and its other services might just suffer in the process.

About TweetDeck

TweetDeck started life out as a third-party application that was released in 2008. By June 2009, it was  the most popular non-Twitter.com tool with 19.7% market share, according to Sysmosos. Twitter purchased TweetDeck in May 2011.

The application recently added four new search filters, but only to the application for Web and Chrome and not for mobile. 

The four filters were Showing, which allowed users to decide if they wanted to  Tweets with only images, videos, or links; Matching, to only show Tweets that contain the word(s) entered in the text field; Excluding, to only show Tweets that do not contain the words entered in the text field; and Retweets, to  choose whether to include or exclude retweets from the column.

In addition to these new filters, Twitter has spent the last two years improving TweetDeck, debuting real-time Tweet updating in columns, keyboard shortcuts & navigation, a new interface and the options to change font size and column width, a more extensive quick actions menu on each Tweet, performance upgrades, and full profile header images. Twitter also made other search improvements, including typeahead and people search.

While it does not bode well for TweetDeck that it is being relegated to PC-only status, perhaps the amount of time and effort Twitter has been putting into it will give it a little bit of breathing room.

(Image source: https://mashable.com)