In a recent blog full of marketting crap, Twitter announced that they are dropping all versions of TweetDeck except for the web-based app, and that they are also dropping support for Facebook integration. Well, that's too bad because these were the only two things that made me use it.

The annoucement starts like this:

To continue to offer a great product that addresses your unique needs ...

Yeah, right. Great product? Not so much. For starters, it would have been really great if it had gotten support for Google Plus at some point. Something that many of us were desperately hoping for.

As for my "unique needs", thank you very much but you don't know squat about them obviously, and besides, they're not even "unique". Again, for many of us, what were the 2 crucial features of TweetDeck, compared to the other alternatives?

1. Social net aggregation (including Twitter and Facebook) plus sorting and filtering facilities; something that many other tools (such as HootSuite) do,
2. Social net merging, something that to the best of my knowledge, no other tool does.

This second feature was absolutely crucial to me. The ability to have the "Home" column displaying all social feeds all at once, all in one place. The "Interactions" column displaying a merge of all my interactions on both Facebook and Twitter all at once, all in one place. Boy, did I wish Google Plus was there as well. And now this is all gone.

So I guess I'm back to the stone age now. One freaking web page for every social net. Or I could finally switch to HootSuite, with its so ugly and so much bloated interface. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think HootSuite does social merging (is there a tool left that does it now?). But at least, it has some partial support for Google Plus (only pages; let's hope that this will change soon).

The annoucement starts like this:

From the whole TweetDeck team, we’re excited about what the future holds. We hope you are too.

Well, you know, not so much, really.

So long, TweetDeck, and thanks for your help until today.

Hint: the next social net killer app will need to do social merging, sorting and filtering, with at least Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus. Now, to your keyboards, you geeks.