TweetDeck set for a big overhaul this year, says Twitter’s Kayvon Beykpour

TweetDeck is the go-to platform for publishers and others to manage their Twitter accounts. The platform offers a variety of power features such as scheduling tweets, tracking other Twitter handles and managing multiple accounts. The dashboard has remained more or less for quite some time. But this is going to change as Twitter plans to revamp TweetDeck very soon.

During an interview with The Verge, Twitter product chief Kayvon Beykpour acknowledged that the product team hadn’t “given TweetDeck a lot of love recently.” He further said that the company plans to improve the platform later this year. The improvement to TweetDeck will be part of Twitter’s larger efforts to improve its developer tools.

“That’s about to change; we’ve been working on a pretty big overhaul from the ground up of TweetDeck, and it’s something that we’re excited to share publicly sometime this year. And so that’s just an example of a Twitter-owned and operated service that we will continue investing in,” he said.

“We also, over the last five years, I think, haven’t given a lot of love to our developer ecosystem. A bunch of reasons for that, some missteps that we’d taken in the past, then also sort of prioritization. We are also changing that; in the last year and a half we’ve really stepped up both our commitment and follow-through on just innovating around the API again, getting the API back to parity from our own internal APIs that we use to build functionality,” he added.

Beykpour also stressed the need for earning the trust of developers. He admitted that the company had made several mistakes in this direction, but was looking to improve things. The Twitter executive did not reveal what improvements will come to TweetDeck, whether it will be under-the-hood changes or visual refresh, or a combination of both.

It may be recalled Twitter had acquired TweetDeck in 2011 for $40 million. According to a Bloomberg report last month, Twitter is planning to charge some power users for a suite of services including the popular TweetDeck. The platform is currently free and does not have advertisements, one of the reasons for its popularity among publishers and other users.