In the past 72 hours, the hashtag #RIPTweetDeck has been making the rounds on Twitter. It circulated in light of news that Twitter is shutting down its TweetDeck applications for iPhone, Android and AIR TweetDeck.
But TweetDeck's not dead yet. Far from it.
A blog post on the controversial decision three days ago notes the move was made so development resources could be focused on "modern, web-based versions of TweetDeck." Twitter seems to be delivering on that promise already with a nice new update for TweetDeck released yesterday.
The announcement was overshadowed by Facebook's flashy press event on its newly-designed News Feed. However, it's actually a pretty big deal and TweetDeck users are going to be excited about this update.
Now there are content filters for TweetDeck columns. They'll appear in every TweetDeck column and you can turn them on or off as you please.
The "content" dropdown allows you to restrict tweets appearing to only those with images, videos, any media, links, or matching certain keywords. You can also exclude tweets with certain keywords or exclude retweets. So, a couple use cases: You could say I only want to see tweets from people I follow with photos in them. Or you could say I want to exclude any tweets with #sxsw.
The "user" dropdown allows you to limit tweets in a column only to verified users if you'd like, or only tweets from users on a specific Twitter list. There are so many applications of this -- brands could monitor mentions from verified users, or you could look for multiple keywords on breaking news but only show results from verified journalists, or from a Twitter list.
Finally, there's an "alerts" column that allows you to request a sound or popup if your filtered column returns a result.
Here's what the new search filters look like in action:
The keyboard shortcuts seem to have been upgraded as well. If you log in to TweetDeck, you may see a banner asking if you're aware of the new shortcuts. Here's a list of them:
ActionsR - Reply
T - Retweet
F - Favorite
N - New Tweet
D - Direct Message
P - View User Profile
Return - View Tweet Details
Ctrl + Return - Send Tweet
A - Add Column
Navigation
? - Help On Shortcuts
Arrows - Right, Left, Down, Up
Space - Page Down
1...9 - Column 1-9
0 - Final Column
S - Search
TweetDeck has continuously been upgrading its features since it was acquired by Twitter in May 2011.
Last month, the platform introduced wider columns, bigger and smaller fonts, and faster keyboard scrolling. In October, it launched new themes and font options.
Twitter also released a major update for TweetDeck around this time last year, when it introduced list management, activity and interactions, media previews and the ability to edit retweets.