Testing The Future - Introducing TweetDeck Web Beta

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Wednesday, 6 April 2011

As Whitney Houston sang, “We believe that web apps are our future”… (well, near enough…). And today we’re launching a beta of a web app that you’re going to really love*.

Since its launch in December last year, Chrome TweetDeck has consistently been the most popular app in the Google Web Store. We are delighted to see that almost 400,000 users are now enjoying the super-slick new interface, and great new features like combined columns, enhanced Facebook integration and the flexibility that running in a web browser brings.

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As we said at the time, Chrome TweetDeck marks the start of a new era for TweetDeck, with all efforts now focussed on building our next-generation products as HTML5 and mobile apps. Since then we have been working hard, not only on improving the existing ChromeDeck experience, but also on bringing the same TweetDeck app to other web platforms.

So today we are very pleased to announce that we are opening up a limited beta of TweetDeck Web. This new service is built on the same core as Chrome TweetDeck, with the same UI and broadly the same product features (the main difference being that TweetDeck Web does not use Twitter streaming). TweetDeck Web, however, is a standalone web site and requires no downloads, no App Stores and is not limited to any one brand of web browser.

Initially we need a small cross-section of users to test TweetDeck Web across the recent versions of all the major web browsers. As a guide, we are particularly targeting Chrome, Firefox 3.6, Firefox 4 and Safari, with support for Opera and Internet Explorer 9 being added soon. 

As with previous beta products, access will be granted by whitelisting your TweetDeck account. Only users with whitelisted TweetDeck accounts will be able to acces TweetDeck Web Beta initially, but we will gradually open up the process to more users over time.

If you would like to help us create a fantastic new product that will be the future of TweetDeck, please sign up with your TweetDeck account here : www.tweetdeck.com/webbeta.

We obviously need to test TweetDeck Web on a broad range of systems, so when you sign up, please tell us which specific web browser and version you use. Once we have identified the initial group of testers, we will send emails to The Chosen Ones, with more detail about the beta and explaining how to give us feedback. 

So if you fancy helping us shape the very latest TweetDeck goodies, sign up now. We look forward to welcoming you to the future!

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* …if you are a fan of TweetDeck and web apps that is. Obviously, if you’re not, then you probably won’t, so feel free to not read the rest of the article. Thanks :)