What Do “Power Users” Think About the Twitter Acquisition of TweetDeck?
When Twitter announced last month that it had acquired TweetDeck, they praised the tool as “a groundbreaking dashboard for monitoring what people are saying in real time,” and pledged to continue supporting the platform, while TweetDeck's founder Iain Dodsworth congratulated his team for “a huge win” and offered assurances that TweetDeck would keep its “unwavering focus on providing high-quality tools and services for the Twitter-centric power-user.”
While both sides of the acquisition seem to think that it will be a win-win scenario for the combined companies and the user, I thought it might be useful to get perspectives from some of the so-called “power users” in my professional network on Twitter.
Jeff Jackson, Jeff Lail and Laura Pasquini host the Campus Tech Connection podcast on BreakDrink.Com. All have been TweetDeck users in the past, and use Twitter regularly for professional networking and for publishing announcements and information related to BreakDrink, its podcasts, and a related site, StudentAffairs.TV.
Rey Junco, an associate professor at Lock Haven University, conducts research on how social media and other technologies (such as Facebook, Instant Messaging, Blogs, Twitter, and Cell Phones) impact the psychosocial development of college students. Junco’s books include Connecting to the Net.Generation: What higher education professionals need to know about today’s students and Using emerging technologies to help engage students.
Bryan Koval is a Housefellow and Coordinator for Community Standards at Carnegie Mellon University, and a doctoral student in the Higher Education Administration program at George Washington University.
I posed the same five questions to each of these people, and received some interesting perspectives about why they like TweetDeck and similar tools, what developments they would like to see result from the merger, and some interesting speculation about what they think Twitter had to gain by buying TweetDeck, and how the average user might be affected.
If you use Tweetdeck, what makes it a good tool for following Twitter conversations?
Koval: Tweetdeck is good for following Twitter conversations because it allows me easily make search columns for particular hashtags. These update in essentially real-time, so it highlights those conversations even if I'm not following all of the individuals who are involved.
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