I used to use TweetDeck back in the day. Of course, that was before there were very many alternatives, and there also weren't very many social networks, at least to speak of. Pinterest and Google+ didn't exist, LinkedIn wasn't used like it is today, and MySpace was already a memory. With the platform being able to consolidate Twitter and Facebook into one interface, it was the coolest thing going at the time. Oh, how times change.
Earlier this month, Tweetdeck ended support for Facebook feeds, becoming essentially nothing more than another Twitter client in an already overcrowded field, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense to start with. To make matters worse and even more bizarre, they pulled their apps from Android and iOS and ended the TweetDeck AIR client. So, to put this in a nutshell, they are now essentially a Twitter client which doesn't even operate on mobile devices. Seriously?
In this humble writer's opinion, they should have should closed up shop altogether or gone into the sandwich making business. Unless there is some super-secret plan for Twitter to eliminate all other social networks and then use TweetDeck as their exclusive platform, the whole thing is more than a little strange. Of course, just as I grew up and moved on from simple and basic social clients, so have most other serious users and small businesses.
The social monitoring space has become a full-fledged sector in online marketing and an indispensable part of modern business practices. We were all told (correctly) 10 years ago that if you didn't have a .com address somewhere in your advertising you were destined to be overshadowed by the competition. Today, if you don't have a social media manager (or department) with a solid piece of social media management software, you are looking at the same shakeout that happened with companies that refused to believe that the web was the future of business.
The social space is growing fast, not only internally on the big sites, but in cross-platform aggregators like RebelMouse and in the boom of social monitoring dashboards. In my mind apps like Tweetdeck only had two ways to go: expand to meet the growing demand and business uses, or get into another business. The path that they took is definitely the path less traveled, although I can't see anything at the end of that path but a big cliff to fall off of.