TweetDeck v0.36.1 Changes Detailed Analysis

I’ve done a detailed analysis of TweetDeck v.0.36.1 to see what the changes are from TweetDeck v0.35.3. Since twitter announced that ads will be coming to user timelines soon, my main goal was to see if this update was adding that functionality before I upgraded.

The TweetDeck v.0.36.1 Documented Changes

These are the documented changes from TweetDeck’s blog:

1. New Twitter Streaming API: The new twitter User Streams API allows for a user to make a single streaming connection to the twitter servers to be pushed updates from the user’s followings. Looking at the code, I can see that some caching was removed and the streaming engine was added to support this change.
2. New Boolean search function for Real-time search columns. TweetDeck’s blog post from July says that the old API will be used if you specify anything other than OR as an operator, phrases surrounded by quotes, and the hyphen (-) before an object to exclude/negate it. Note that if you don’t specify OR, AND is assumed. This is seen in the code in the new StringSearcher class in Utils.
3. You will now see when people add you to a list in your follower column. It looks like this feature was added to the function loadListSubscribers when using the old API.
4. You will now see when people favorite your tweets in your mention column. There were a lot of changes to go through, but I didn’t see this and I think it’s just part of the streaming of your feed from Twitter. I didn’t see this implemented in the old API, but didn’t test it.
5. Twitter is switching the way that unique IDs are assigned to each tweet in their new Snowflake method, forcing TweetDeck to switch from storing them numericallly to storing them as strings. It looks like TweetDeck went one step further and switched all IDs, including user IDs to strings. This was likely a lot of work, and the team should be given a day off or two, if they haven’t.

The TweetDeck v.0.36.1 Undocumented Changes

TweetDeck also announces in their blog that the new version has some changes that they won’t be revealing until later.

Also in this build is a bit of very special TweetDeck magic….

We’re not letting on exactly what this magic does just yet, but we can tell you that it opens the door to some very exciting cross-platform TweetDeck communication.

Here are the bigger undocumented changes that I found:

1. Removed the code for an unimplemented comments and rating system (including yellow bird icon)
2. Added code for retweeting more types of objects
3. Added support for URL shortener goo.gl
4. Added some backend support for some new social activity column called “Social Graph Activity”
5. Addressed many possible injection vulnerabilities by adding sanitation in various places
6. Addressed account security by adding SSL protected verifyUser function

The “very special TweetDeck magic”?

I think the new “magic” is the MockTwitterEvent class, for injecting tweets into the stream. This should allow TweetDeck to not only add remote server side functionality to your twitter stream, but also inject ads (not that they couldn’t do this before). I’m guessing that they’ll be rolling out some neat features to integrate your other social media accounts into your twitter feed, and maybe even some additional functionality like calendar notices and alarm clock type stuff. We’ll see.