TweetDeck, now with scheduled updates and more

With all the buzz about the iPad and rumors of the iPhone finally moving into the wild where mere mortals can afford it, you may not have heard the news that TweetDeck has undergone a major upgrade.  The venerable desktop social media client now sports some of the coolest features around, including the long awaited ability to post scheduled updates.

TweetDeck can connect you with just about any social networking site you might want to keep on top of as well.  The list  now includes Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Linkedin, fourSquare, Google Buzz and others. This expanded ability to stay on top of the networks you interact with on a daily basis can’t help but make you more (or less) productive.

There are a lot of new features included in this release, like better filtering, spam blocking and in-client video capabilities but the one feature that TweetDeck has been sorely missing is the ability to schedule replies.  That’s no longer a problem.

If you’re a die-hard HootSuite user you’ll probably note that the scheduling function of TweetDeck is only good as long as the application is open, so is not a replacement for the online app’s functionality.  For most Desktop users this probably won’t be an issue, since I doubt that you ever shut down TweetDeck anyway.  So for all of us who really couldn’t get into HootSuite as a tool for social media, TweetDeck has closed some pretty serious gaps in functionality.

Updated: I’ve been informed that scheduled updates are stored on the TweetDeck servers, not in the client itself, so the function is 100% on par with that of HootSuite and in a much shinier package.  Thanks very much to @richardbarley for clearing that up!

Will you switch from HootSuite to TweetDeck, or is this just one more reason that you’ll stick with TweetDeck rather than moving to something else?

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