TweetDeck Features Crowded or Convenient

As many of you may have read, Twitter's TweetDeck has recently added features connecting to Facebook and Myspace. While there seems to be a lot of disinterest in Myspace at this point, there is a lot of buzz about the Facebook features.

In TweetDeck, you will see more than just the usual status updates. You can customize your feeds and create columns for things like the full news feed, status updates, photos, videos, wall posts, etc. This allows you to weed out feeds of information which you are not interested in. The process is pretty streamlined, which is important, but a lot of voices have raised concern over whether the new TweetDeck is going to get murky.

Most social networking tools tend to start out simple so as not to scare away new users who are intimidated by too many apps. But power users are an important consideration as well, and they are the individuals who devour new features and apps. It's a delicate balancing act which seems to be growing more and more difficult as social network tools age.

The fact that TweetDeck lets you put in the feeds you want is a good sign. If users have the option of customizing an application's complexity, they can involve themselves in social networking at their own pace.

The functionality of TweetDeck's Facebook access is also nice. Whatever you can do directly on Facebook you can now do through TweetDeck, including viewing and adding comments, seeing who is tagged in photos, watching slide shows, etc.

TweetDeck's CEO Iain Dodsworth has expressed the company's ambitions to turn their product into the real-time browser for the web. This explains the lack of exclusivity among supported networks like Myspace. Will TweetDeck successfully wind up becoming our unifying portal for accessing all our favorite real-time networks? I guess it all depends on how much easier it is than bouncing around the web.