TweetDeck gets updated with four new search filters

Users can create a "media only" column in order to better find images and videos

Since releasing its new API last August, it has been no secret that Twitter has very little interest in allowing any third party apps to infringe on its territory. The social network is essentially forcing users to only use apps owned and developed by Twitter.

Since that is now the case, the least Twitter can do is try to make those apps as highly functioning and user friendly as possible. And when it comes to TweetDeck, Twitter's social media dashboard application, it has been doing just that, coming out with a series of updates and new features over the last couple of years.

In the latest move to improve TweetDeck, Twitter has added four new search filters to the application for Web and Chrome, the company announced via blogpost Tuesday.

The  new filters "allow you to show or exclude specific words and phrases from a TweetDeck column –– especially useful when you want to focus on a particular element of a column," Twitter wrote.

The four filters are:

• Showing - click on the drop down menu to choose to show: all Tweets (default), Tweets with images, Tweets with videos, Tweets with any media (images + videos) or Tweets with links
• Matching - only show Tweets that contain the word(s) entered in the text field
• Excluding - only show Tweets that do not contain the words entered in the text field
• Retweets - choose whether to include or exclude retweets from the column

For example, a user can choose to only show Tweets that contain media, such as images or video, turning one of the columns into one exclusively for media. This makes it easier and faster to search for a particular image or video. 

Twitter, of course, recently got into the video creation space with the release of Vine, which allows users to create and share six second long looping videos that can be embedded into tweets. Twitter obviously wants it to be easier to find and share these videos, though it may want to tread carefully with that, considering some of the problems that have come up so far.

“Today’s release, as well as our recent release of content filters for search columns, is part of our ongoing efforts to bring the features and capabilities of our AIR app to TweetDeck web,” Twitter wrote.

In addition to these new filters, Twitter notes that it has been improving TweetDeck for the past two years. It has debuted 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,

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.

TweetDeck is lucky to have been purchased by Twitter. If not, it may have suffered the fate of other apps, such as Birdsong, a Windows Phone Twitter client, which was forced to shut down in January because of Twitter's API restrictions.

(Image source: https://www.mediabistro.com)