What The Heck Happened to TweetDeck?

TweetDeck seems to have gone from being one of the most powerful applications for Twitter to now being a pretty useless platform at best.

I understand Twitter purchased TweetDeck for $40M+ and though there are many stories out there about how this was a bad idea, I believe TweetDeck was a great program and I used it, primarily for my organic interactions, with my Twitter followers, so I would definitely would have bought this program if I was Twitter.

I stayed with the older version as long as I could, but not long ago Twitter has made the older version unusable as it will not send any tweets. The version I was using was v0.38.1.

I updated to the newest version and OMG all the functionality has been taken out of the program. It seems it is no longer worth the time to use it.

I am no expert, but this is what I believe they got rid of:

The ability to send tweets to multiple followers at the same time
The ability to highlight the tweets
The ability to answer a re-tweet
The ability to clear only read messages
Hookup to Linkedin, Google+, etc… so just Twitter
Deck.ly support is dropped
Shorten Tweets is gone
No longer loads in background memory, now stays as a closed window on the taskbar (MS Windows)

I do like that it does not crash as much as the older versions, but since it doesn’t do much of what pharmacy no rx made it great, I am at a loss as to why Twitter would spend that much just to pull out all the guts?!

Twitter, as I understand it, also got rid of TweetDeck for mobile platforms? I have wondered since Twitter first started, if they really know who they are and where they are going. It has been a discussion I have had with many Social Media Experts and many say that they feel Twitter has shot themselves in the foot many times with third party apps and other things.

What compels a company to pay$40M plus for a great program that makes your product even better and much more usable than it already is and then gut it and essentially destroy it? No one would want to buy this application at this point so they have made it pretty worthless all in all.

OK I have been pretty negative here, so I will say that the new program does have better filtering ability and I would like to say that I really like Twitter as a social media platform. I do like to end on a positive note if possible.

Would love to find out what you think and if you have more info on TweetDeck I would love your comments below.