Kayvon Beykpour said in a March interview with The Verge that Twitter does know TweetDeck still exists and the company is working on an overhaul “from the ground up.” Today, Twitter posted a single image of the reworked app, explaining that it represents a preview going into testing with a few “randomly-selected” people from the US, Canada, and Australia. If you can’t wait to see it yourself, Jane Manchun Wong explains how you can opt in to the test right now with a simple browser tweak.
We’re testing this preview with a small group of randomly-selected people in the United States, Canada, and Australia to start. If you’re eligible, you’ll see an invitation within TweetDeck to opt in.
— TweetDeck (@TweetDeck) July 20, 2021
TweetDeck powers The Verge’s newsroom, and many others, so any changes are likely to meet a skeptical audience of power users, but so far it’s tough to find the improvements. The app’s appeal is in its column views that haven’t changed much over the last decade, but the layout in the screenshot looks very different from what we’re used to, and in the left column a button promotes decks to sort various content types. Otherwise, it looks a lot more like the standard Twitter view, which isn’t why I use TweetDeck.
In a tweet today, Beykpour said that new features in testing for TweetDeck “include a full Tweet Composer, new advanced search features, new column types, and a new way to group columns into clean workspaces.” Twitter may have more reasons to hope the upgrades are a hit — rumors have said the company is considering charging for it in the future.
To try out the “new TweetDeck,” just follow Jane’s instructions. Open TweetDeck in your browser, then go to Developer Tools (if you’re using Chrome), open the console tab, copy and paste document.cookie = “tweetdeck_version=beta” then hit enter and reload the page.
We’ll take these lessons into account as we explore what TweetDeck could look like within Twitter’s subscription offerings later on. We’ll have more to share soon as we learn from these tests.
— Kayvon Beykpour (@kayvz) July 20, 2021
Update July 20th, 12:40PM ET: Added details on how to try the preview version now.