TweetDeck

Around a month ago, we released the first ever international TweetDeck, with five languages. Today, we are bringing you even more, and the TweetDeck Localisation Preview now supports a stonking ten languages!

On top of the previous languages, we have now also added the following:

Once again, his whole process wouldn't have been possible without our amazing translators. They have worked day and night over the past few months to ensure that TweetDeck is available in their own language and we cannot thank them enough.

An extra special thanks goes to the language team Leaders: Breno Pires, Patrice Leroux, Zoltan Kobolak, Stefano Ricciardi and Dario Alvarez

Brazilian Portuguese

• Breno Pires
• Renato Ferreira
• Laine Bartley
• Carlos Marin
• Klaus Bach
• Authur Garcia

French

• Patrice Leroux
• Adrien Verpillat
• Alban Rampon
• Julien Giner

Hungarian

• Zoltan Kobolak
• Peter Dudas

Italian

• Stefano Ricciardi
• Francesca Valli
• Daniele Amandolini
• Federica Clarizio
• Tziano Tassi

Spanish

• Dario Alvarez
• Manuel Robles
• Alejandro Martinez
• Stacey Hicken
• Miguel Leon

I would like to be a volunteer too, where do I sign?

If you would like to apply to be a volunteer translator, please send an email to localisation@tweetdeck.com with any relevant experience and we will be in touch.

A while ago, as you may recall, Guillermo the TweetDeck bird was travelling and decided that we should make TweetDeck available in lots more languages. Always ready for a challenge, and knowing the dangers of upsetting Guillermo, we set about making this happen. Conrad took control and organised a crack squad of volunteers to help out with the translations, whilst our development team donned their thinking caps and set to work on all the necessary technical bits and bobs to make it work.

And now, after months of hard work from everyone, we are proud to present phase one of the project - the TweetDeck Localisation Preview.

This new version of TweetDeck allows you to use Desktop TweetDeck in any of the following languages:

Great! Where do I get it?

You can download the Localisation Preview version here: http://www.tweetdeck.com/i18n    (Why "i18n"?)

We have set up a special forum to track any problems specific to the Localisation Preview, so please go here to report any problems or suggestions with regard to the technical operation of the app or any of the translations.

Be aware that this version of TweetDeck is currently NOT using the User Streams API. 

OK I installed, how do I change the language?

Here's what you will need to do to change the language of the TweetDeck app. 

1. Install the update from the link above
2. Navigate to Settings > General
3. Select your language in the drop-down box and click Save on the settings window.
4. Restart TweetDeck
5. Remove your columns and then re-add them to see column headings in the correct language

Please note: At this time we are not yet able to offer spelling dictionaries for these languages. We are investigating options here but currently spell-check will still only be in US-English only.

 

Fantastic job on the translations! Who do I thank?

This whole process wouldn't have been possible without our amazing translators. They have worked day and night over the past few months to ensure that TweetDeck is available in their own language and we cannot thank them enough.

An extra special thanks goes to the language team Leaders:  Shinji Arakawa, Patrick Mackaaij, Reza Hasfinada & José Airosa

Japanese

• Shinji Arakawa
• Mitsuhiro Yoshida
• Tetz Hakoda
• Motoko Takano
• Takamoto Ando
• Yuya Saito

Dutch

• Patrick Mackaaij
• Laura Vermeer
• Maurice van Eynsbergen
• Delmar Sumter
• Tom Verbeek

Indonesian

• Reza Hasfinada
• Joni Liu

Portuguese

• José Airosa
• Oscar Marcelo
• Bruno Miguel Araújo Bruto da Costa
• Manuel Reis

I would like to be a volunteer too, where do I sign?

If you would like to apply to be a volunteer translator, please send an email to localisation@tweetdeck.com with any relevant experience and we will be in touch.

I think it’s fair to say that the reaction to our User Streams Preview version of TweetDeck was extremely positive.

TechCrunch called it “Crack for Real-time Web Junkies”. The Next Web summarised their experience succinctly as “Twitter in real time. Mind. Blown."

The world of Twitter at true real-time really is a new and exciting place, with Tweets and alerts flying in at lightning speed, making your conversations more like instant messaging rather than asynchronous postings.

When we initially launched our User Streams Preview version we had to put in place a strict whitelisting procedure. The Twitter User Streams Preview API is still very new and we had to be very cautious about our rollout. This was in order to allow the boffins at Twitter HQ to monitor the capacity of their systems and ensure that everything didn’t go up in a puff of blue smoke once we turned our app over to the public.

Well, it seems that everything is going well at their end. So well, in fact, that they are ready to let us extend the preview to anyone that would like to try it!

So, from now on, you can just download the User Streams Preview TweetDeck through its dedicated page at http://www.tweetdeck.com/streaming/ or directly from http://www.tweetdeck.com/go/userstream. No sign-up. No waiting. Just install, run, and hop on The Deck at full-speed.

During the limited preview period we have been constantly improving, refining and ironing out the kinks to bring you the best real-time Twitter experience to date. However, this is still a preview product, so things may still break and change, but we think the advantages that you gain by having true real-time Twitter feeds makes this an essential download for anyone serious about being ahead of the game on Twitter.

These days you hear a lot of talk about “The Real-Time Web”, with instant delivery of information to your desktop from across the globe. But in reality, many services are not actually operating in real-time.

Take the example of most desktop Twitter clients. If @aplusk choses to tweet some hints about his latest blockbuster movie, his gazillions of followers won’t receive this message straight away; They will have to wait until their Twitter client fetches the next batch of updates from the Twitter API. Depending on current API limits, this could take a couple of minutes - and in a world where sometimes 3000 tweets per second are being generated, that could feel like a long time.

However, all is not lost...

Twitter recently announced a “developer preview” of their User Streams API. This preview version of their API is not generally available yet, but is currently being tested by some of the biggest users of the Twitter API, including TweetDeck of course. The User Streams API works differently to the original, poll-based API in that apps no longer have to check for updates on a regular interval. Instead, an app will open what is, in theory (but almost certainly not literally), a big pipe from Twitter to the app. Then, when Ashton hits Send on his latest tweet, that tweet gets pushed straight down the big pipe and lands in your Twitter client instantly.

That’s real “Real Time”.

And its not only tweets that get the supercharged treatment. Other actions that are relevant to you are also brought immediately to your attention. For example, if someone follows you - WOOSH, it’s there. If someone favourites one of your tweets - BAM, straight into your Mentions. Oh and discovering new people to follow is made a lot easier with the addition of an option to see @replies from your friends to other people that you don’t follow. This is a big change from the standard behaviour where you only see replies to people that you actually follow.

And of course, what better way to consume this true real-time feed than via an experimental version of TweetDeck for Desktop?

We have been working closely with Twitter to develop a version of TweetDeck that makes use of their User Streams API and we are delighted to announce that we are now in a position to open this up to a very limited public preview.

Now, before you all go crazy hitting the download link and getting giddy with excitement, there are some important things you need to know.

1. This is a VERY experimental version of TweetDeck
2. You need to sign-up with a TweetDeck account in order to use it
3. Initially only 5000 TweetDeck accounts will be granted access.
4. There may be problems, changes, disruptions and other issues that could affect the operation of this version of TweetDeck.
5. If you wish to stop using this version of TweetDeck, you will need to uninstall it and reinstall the latest “live” version from www.tweetdeck.com

If you want to help us test out this cool new version of TweetDeck, please visit the sign-up page at https://www.tweetdeck.com/api/stream_whitelist.

Once signed-up, we will then send you an email when we are ready to enable your access, which will include a link to download the new client.

You can then start sampling your Twitter feed in TweetDeck at the speed of "Wow!".