April 09, 2009, 8:03 AM — Yesterday I talked a little bit about a new TweetDeck competitor, Seesmic Desktop. I found it to be interesting but not really ready to tackle TweetDeck head on, yet.
Well, the folks developing TweetDeck aren't going to make it easy for Seesmic to catch up. Less than a day after Seesmic released its Preview software, TweetDeck got an update. The main focus of the update was to fix a memory leak that plagued TweetDeck (causing the application to consume more and more memory the longer it ran) but it included a few new features as well.
You can now opt to preview short URLs and TwitPics. This functionality is disabled by default, but once you turn it on, clicking a short URL will pop up a window with the title and full URL of the destination. A second click opens the link in your browser. This is an excellent security feature, even if it is a bit more cumbersome than just clicking off to an unknown destination. As Twitter becomes more popular and a juicier target for malware spammers, features like this need to become standard for Twitter clients.
The TwitPic preview works simliarly. A window pops up with a generous thumbnail of the actual image. This is more a time saver than a security feature. You can decide if the image is worth a second click and switching over to you browser to look at. Since a lot of Twitter picture posters tend to post images that are only relevant to friends 'in on the joke' this is a handy feature.
The last big addition is Facebook status integration. Next to the update box is a pair of checkboxes for Twitter and Facebook. You can send any update as a Tweet, as a Facebook Status update, or both.
TweetDeck is free, and of course so is the update. If you've tried TweetDeck in the past and found it to be too much of a resource hog, it might be time to try it again. If you just found it too complex, nothing in this update is going to make the product any more appealing.
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