Twitter Launches New Version of TweetDeck Before it Goes Premium

Twitter made a new version of TweetDeck available for all users yesterday. TweetDeck 2.0 is launching as Twitter’s decision to temporarily limit usage received a huge backlash, and to make things worse, the company announced that TweetDeck will go premium in 30 days.

“In 30 days, users must be Verified to access TweetDeck,” the Twitter Support team shared yesterday in a tweet detailing new TweetDeck 2.0 features. A lot of companies and social media experts have been relying on TweetDeck to monitor what’s happening on the network, and the decision to make TweetDeck a paid feature has ruffled a lot of feathers.

We have just launched a new, improved version of TweetDeck. All users can continue to access their saved searches & workflows via https://t.co/2WwL3hNVR2 by selecting “Try the new TweetDeck” in the bottom left menu.

Some notes on getting started and the future of the product…

— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 3, 2023

To be fair, Twitter has reportedly been planning to make TweetDeck a paid feature even before Musk acquired the company last year. In March 2022, reverse engineer Jane Manchung Wong found lines of codes suggesting that TweetDeck could soon become a paid Twitter Blue feature.

As a professional social dashboard, TweetDeck competes with freemium apps such as HootSuite or Buffer that allow social media managers to monitor other social networks than Twitter. Until now, TweetDeck had the advantage of being free to use, but making it a paid feature is likely going to push power users to start looking elsewhere.

Twitter’s recent decision to limit the number of tweets users can see throughout the day was, according to a blog post published yesterday, implemented to “detect and eliminate bots and other bad actors that are harming the platform.” The company said that the restrictions currently affect “a small percentage of people using the platform” and that the impact on advertising has been “minimal.”

Still, Twitter’s rate limits and the recent news of TweetDeck going premium continue to erode trust in a platform that has been poorly managed since Elon Musk’s takeover last year. As the blue bird appears to be walking on very thin ice, Meta is preparing to launch its own Twitter clone called Threads tomorrow, July 7, according to the app’s App Store listing.