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Tweetdeck Syncing Sucks

Like many people I spend a fair bit of time everyday using twitter from multiple computers, I basically have 4 points 1) work PC 2) Home Mac 3) Mac laptop and 4) iPhone. As I’ve discussed in prior posts here and here, the biggest problem I have with twitter clients today is the inability to filter users into groups and have those same groups accessible from all my access points. As a general rule I do my best to read most all tweets from the people that I follow, as a result putting people into group makes this process more efficient. I have an email system that satisfied this but for other reasons (which I am in the process of writing a sort of postmortem on). When I heard the latest version of Tweetdeck provided syncing of groups and there members across all platforms in conjunction with the launch of their iPhone application I honestly thought tweetdeck would solve my issues. In nearly a week of testing I have found the latest version of tweetdeck, 0.26.2, to absolutely suck at syncing. And I think I will avoid tweetdeck until they fix these features as I have sunk hours into trying to get these issues resolved and the tweetdeck staff has been absolutely unresponsive on twitter, via email, via blog comment responses, or their feedback forum.

Issue

Group names will sync between all tweetdeck installs but members of the each group DO NOT sync between machines in all cases. I don’t know exactly what the issue is but, in 3 entire fresh starts I have been able to replicate that group members do not sync in their entirety (actually its more like 5% of group members sync). I have a hunch part of the issue relates to the follower list tweetdeck loads. According to tweetdeck’s feedback forum many users (those who follow mare then 100 people) will not have all the users they follow in their local list (for groups or auto complete). According to Tweetdeck, this is because they only pull the last 100 and then builds the list as the application gains “experience” and is done in order to save on API calls. In general, I am fine with the approach as it shouldn’t be a big issue. However, where it seems to be a major issue in the only tweetdeck group members that appear to sync are those that are included in the local copy of the following list. I can not confirm this, but it appears to be the case through my testing.

Conclusion (sorry I know I’m jumping a step but my ADD and all)

Tweetdeck syncing will not work for people who follow more than 100 people OR there is another flaw that prohibits tweetdeck from actually syncing all group members across all machines.

Testing

As I mentioned, I have spent hours trying to get this to work over the last few days to no avail through three separate tests.

First, since I had been using tweetdeck prior to the 0.26 release (which provided the syncing capability) on my work PC for about a week, I already had approx 5 groups set up which was working just fine (again it was only on one machine). With the 0.26 release I upgraded, created a tweetdeck account, and began syncing. After syncing my work PC (which had the base tweetdeck) I proceeded to install tweetdeck on my home Mac (there was a previous version installed so it was a replace) and use the “I already have a tweetdeck account” option. Upon syncing my home Mac I noticed all my groups were present, but people that I had placed into groups were appearing in “all friends” but not in the groups they were assigned to on my work PC. I also tried out the iPhone application and again, all the groups were there but the users in the groups were wrong. Changes that were made on the iPhone were not replicated on the Mac or the work PC. In short, I had all the same group names but across machines none of the groups had the same members. Painful. During this period tweetdeck did quickly release 2 updates, up to 0.26.2, all of which I installed.

Thinking maybe I had jumped the gun and having read similar reports I decided to try setting up a new tweetdeck account. Thus my second test. I started by removing all the groups from my home Mac (and from the server). I then created a new tweetdeck account and proceeded to recreate my groups and spent an hour or two over the day repopulating the groups in tweetdeck. At this point this is the only machine that has run tweetdeck linked to this new account. After I had pretty good coverage of my groups in tweetdeck, I then removed all the groups from my work PC instance of tweetdeck, removed the old tweetdeck account, restarted, and added my new (the second) tweetdeck account. Again, all my groups I had created on the home Mac appeared on the work PC but the group members were not complete. People that were clearly in the “friend” group on the home Mac where not members of the “friend” group on the work PC, same thing when I tried the new tweetdeck account on my iPhone.

For the third and finial attempt, I did a clean install of tweetdeck on my home Mac (everything including Adobe Air was reinstalled with all the preferences removed). I set up tweetdeck with my twitter credentials, and created a new, third, tweetdeck account. Again, I proceeded over the course of a day, to propagate new groups in this fresh install of tweetdeck and this third account. During this time my home Mac was the only machine running tweetdeck. The following day (allowing time in case the server needed time, why I don’t know), I did a clean install of the latest tweetdeck on my work PC (yes, I removed all settings and preferences and started clean), after loading tweetdeck on my work PC I logged in with this third tweetdeck account, again all the groups synced and appeared but only a handful of the group members actually synced. Again, a totally failure and waste of time.

Observation

I will note here, that in each of these three cases I was building the groups using the “user-> add to group” feature of each tweet, I HAD to do this because the “edit this group” listing did not have all a complete list of everyone I follow. I also noted that if I had added group members using the “user-> add to group” function on an individual tweet and then edited the group using the “edit group” listing , and saved changes, those people who where not present in the local listing of people I’m following were no longer members of that group as new tweets came in. This was observed on the same machine without another machine syncing with the account. As a result, I believe when tweetdeck sync the members of a group it relies or requires those users to be part of the local “people I’m following” list to be included in the local group, if those users are not present in the local list they are no added to the group on the local machine but will still be part of the group on the machine I create the group on. Moreover, it’s entirely random that tweetdeck does not add users to this local list when I add them to a group and they are not already present in the local listing of people I am following. These observations lead to my conclusion regarding the incomplete listing of people I am following in tweetdeck and its impact on its syncing.

I’m going to go try Seesmic desktop now, and it appears you can do your own syncing of groups and with their historic rapid development and upcoming iPhone app I can only assume group syncing will be included, and that it will work from the start. Fingers crossed.

UPDATED: update posted on 7-20-09 here.

Posted in Twitter on June 29th, 2009 Taged with Seesmic, TweetDeck, Twitter

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