Tweetdeck released update 0.34.1 last Wednesday and there is a monster load of enhancements and features packed into the latest version of Tweetdeck. The most obvious is that Tweetdeck now offers scheduled tweets which was one feature that Hootsuite had as an advantage over Tweetdeck but does not any longer.  You can read my review comparing Hootsuite to Tweetdeck to see how the two twitter clients stack up against each other.  Tweetdeck also includes API updates allowing you to choose custom URL shorteners, enhanced filters for columns, Google Buzz and Foursquare integration and the ability to upload video and several bug fixes.

I logged into the latest version of Tweetdeck and have to say it runs smooth. The first thing I wanted to try is see if Scheduled tweets are as easy to use as Hootsuite and unfortunately, Tweetdeck has not implemented an easy and user friendly way to schedule tweets.

In Tweetdeck when you click on “Schedule this Update” which looks like a little clock, you are shown a calendar when you click on a date, Tweetdeck should in addition give you the ability to manually allow you to quickly just type in YYYY/MM/DD so that you can schedule tweets quickly without having to manually select a date or click through months. When I want to schedule dates, I want to use the tab key to tab through all the fields I need to enter, and I can do this with Hootsuite, but Tweetdeck only lets you tab and manually enter the Hour and Minute fields manually.

Still, Tweetdeck has improved and you can easily add your “Scheduled Updates” column by going into your “Add Columns” and “Core” options.

I particularly liked Tweetdecks integration with Google Buzz and Foursquare and combined with Facebook and LinkedIn now I can easily extend my poetry game to not just words submitted on Twitter, but notify all my followers on all of my major social networks now if they want to participate and send me a word for the poetry game.

I tested Tweetdeck search, Tweetdeck Groups and various other functions of the Tweetdeck client, I found the Tweetdeck support site to also be very useful if you needed Tweetdeck help or information about any of the new features. Tweetdeck also offers a video tutorial of the program and new features.

Tweetdeck 0.34.1 unfortunately crashes just as often as Tweetdeck 0.33.1 on my Windows 7 64 bit machine and if I leave the program running for 5 or 6 hours it locks up and presents the following error every time:

Hopefully this will be resolved in time.

This is my Tweetdeck review of the new scheduled tweets functionality and I want to hear from my readers who are using Tweetdeck on what they think of the new changes. For those of you who have not tried Tweetdeck for managing tweets, you can download Tweetdeck for Windows and try one of the best Twitter clients for yourself.

-Dragon Blogger

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I was always on the lookout for a new twitter service that may provide some benefit that I am not already getting with HootSuite or Tweetdeck, so I decided to try DynamicTweets. This service allows you to supposedly schedule tweets at intervals (20 for the free version). After logging in and testing the service, none of my tweets ever kicked off, and my account was in pending for many hours, no email was generated to activate the account and I just gave up trying to get the service to work.

At this time, I don’t know if the site is still even up or running, but I would avoid DynamicTweets and use something like TwitRobot to schedule tweets to run automatically in a bot like fashion.

-Dragon Blogger

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I did a previous review on a similar tool called Twuffer, which allows you to post date your twitter tweets, but FutureTweets has some additional features which make it better in some ways.

FutureTweets is a web site that you can write custom twitter messages and schedule them to be delivered at a later date and time, some features it has that Twuffer does not include:

• Automatic re-occurance of tweets

You can set some tweets to broadcast daily, weekly, monthly or even annually. Twuffer has no reoccurance at all.

• Editing already scheduled tweets

Twuffer only gives you the ability to delete a scheduled tweet, but FutureTweets allows you to edit a scheduled tweet in case you want to alter it.

• Set Exact Minute

Twuffer lets you set a specific hour only, like 7am, 11am…etc, but FutureTweets will let you pick the exact minute you want to tweet, so if you want to tweet something in 10 minute intervals, you can schedule it with FutureTweets but not Twuffer.

Twuffer has a slightly easier to use interface than FutureTweets in my opinion and has the advantage of using your Twitter account to login, instead of having to have yet another separate account which you have to create on FutureTweets.

• Summary

Both products need to have a URL Compression service as part of scheduling tweets, they should have URL compression box right next to your schedule tweet window, so you can easily shrink URL’s prior to inserting them into your scheduled message.

Overall, I highly recommend FutureTweets and think it has more features and functionality than Twuffer which was the previous tool I recommended. The ability to set reoccuring tweets is a huge plus for companies and businesses.

-Dragon Blogger

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