Windows 7 Fighting against flaws in TweetDeck

[Nomad of Norad]

Okay, lately I have been having a real hassle dealing with my Twitter feed. I recieve a LOT of tweets in it every day, to the point that on weekdays I actually can't get back to the point where I left off last night because Twitter just stops loading any older tweets than, say, 8 hours ago.

I used to routinely use Firefox to load my feed, but recently it has started crashing out from under me if I scroll down more than 2 hours worth of my Twitter feed. Just suddenly BOOM! ...the Web-browser vanishes and has to be loaded again. I then tried it with all the other Web-browsers I have installed on this machine. Chrome doesn't crash when I go "too far" back into my feed.... but it has another really, REALLY huge flaw that makes it now totally worthless for this: I click a link in my twitter feed, and Chrome loads that page ON THE SAME TAB as the Twitter feed, throwing away 8 or 10 hours worth of Tweets and forcing me to reload the Twitter page over from scratch... and pushing the oldest tweet I WAS looking at past the end of the loadable part of my twitter feed history because new stuff was tweeted since then, so I can't retweet that item anymore.

The only browser I have that does NOT have any of these flaws is the ancient, and no-longer-being-supported-on-Windows, Safari browser. It has issues of its own, such as failing to load the comments section of many pages I get sent to, but I can at least live with it.

I have been trying to move away from using browsers for this, so I dug out TweetDeck, which I'd tried out ages ago, didn't really like, and then in the intirum had forgotten I'd installed, but which was still on my machine. I then wound up banging my head against how IT insists on doing things, and which are completely at odds with how I need to do things. I updated to the newest version, hoping that would fix the issue... but it didn't.

I then scoured the Web looking for alternatives to TweetDeck, came across a couple different "The best Tweet app choices for Windows" guides... and tried to get them all. Trouble is, the majority of the ones on one particular guide no longer even exist anymore, and the majority of the ones I found on the other guide, once installed, either don't work very well, or Twitter simply refuses to let me register my account to them!

So, I'm back to banging my head against the brick wall of TweetDeck's seriously flawed way of working. The main issue I have with TweetDeck is I can scroll way, WAY back into my Twitter feed, going back 8 or 10 hours usually.... but then the moment a new tweet comes on, TweetDeck pops me back to the top of the feed and throws away 80% to 90% of my displayed feed! I then have to scroll laboriously all the way back down to 8 or 10 hours ago to pick up where I left off (assuming the tweet I was on hasn't passed that too-far-into-the-past threshhold now), only to have it a moment later go BOING!!! back up to the top again and throw all that history away AGAIN! I then poked around in Settings, found an option named "Stream Tweets in realtime," and unchecked it, figuring that was the mechanism that made it automatically show me all new incoming tweets the moment they arrive.... but it STILL pops me to the top of the feed listing and dumps those precious old tweets away.

Thing is, in the browser-based version of the Twitter feed, it doesn't automatically insert new tweets at the top of the page, it instead places a number at the top of the page telling me, say, that I have 5 newer tweets than the ones currently displayed, raising that number quietly as additonal new ones gather, doesn't take any other action to the page, and lets me load those new tweets at MY leisure. I want something like that to occur in a Twitter app, but there doesn't seem to be a feature like that in TweetDeck, or in any of the other Twitter apps I WAS able to get working. oO Am I overlooking something? :/

Bear in mind, it usually takes me HOURS to slowly progress forward through all those tweets, deciding what to retweet and what pages to drag-and-drop the URLs of into various folders on my machine. I don't want the thing fighting me every freaking step of the way on that!

 

[brkkab]

As far as alternative Twitter app's go, you're pretty much out of luck. Twitter keep's basically banning them from working. Twitter own's TweetDeck, that's why it actually work's.
If you have Windows 8/8.1 or 10 TP, try the official Twitter app from the Windows Store

 

[Nomad of Norad]

Well, I'm on Windows 7, so can't really use the Windows 8 or 10 apps. And yeah, I saw a blog post somewhere saying that back when TweetDeck was not owned by Twitter, it was a fantastic program, but after Twitter bought them out, it turned into something vastly inferior to what it used to be.

 

[brkkab]

Definitely true. I don't really post their or Facebook. As far as both, I just follow certain people/site's. I'm not that big into social networking. As far as friend's, I'd rather talk to them in person or on the phone.
I maybe, open either TweetDeck/Twitter or Facebook, maybe once every week or two.
I will say the bad part about Twitter in the last few month's are the bs emails about popular on you're network and then everything in the email being in a foreign language.
I just delete the bs Facebook & Twitter emails. I don't need to know what my friend's are doing every second of every day.

 

[Nomad of Norad]

Well, there are a lot of alternative-news places I follow the Twitter feed of, plus some tech-news, some specific-software-related announce groups, some friends, etc. I really wish everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, would move to some not-owned-by-a-big-corporation twitter-and-facebook-replacement social-networking system such as Diaspora. Then corporate dick-moves like what happened to the makers of Twitter apps wouldn't even be possible.

 

[brkkab]

I'll have to try my Twitter app later. Ifollow close to 100 different site's, so it will take forever to scroll down past a week, let alone 2+ weeks.
Also, it appear's recently, in the last few month's like all app developer's have forgotten about 8/8.1, as my various app's used to get updates at least Monday-Friday. Lately, you're lucky if you get any updates every 2 weeks.

 

[Nomad of Norad]

I get the impression Twitter now deliberately prevents me from going back more than X-number of tweets into my twitter feed before it simply stops loading any more of them beyond that. It does this in the web-based front end, and it does it in my iPad app, stopping at exactly the same distance back. I think I used to be able to go back as far as I desired, but somewhere along the line, some months back, that stopped working. So, if I go to bed late in the night -- say, 4 or 5 in the morning (yes, I'm a nightowl) -- then come back at around 3 or 4 in the afternoon... I find I can't get all the way back even to the point where I left off last night! It stops at the 8- or 9-hours-ago mark and simply won't go any farther back!

Oddly, on the weekend I can get more like 14 or 15 hours back and NOT hit that stopping point, but that is mainly because a lot fewer things get tweeted or retweeted by others on the weekends, so there's less stuff to wade through. But even so, there's not a gigantic number of tweets in my feed, just a huge number. I'm following 256 people, but only a small subset of those actually tweet a lot, and quite a few I'm following rarely if ever tweet things.

When I tried it a few days back, it looked like TweetDeck had the same won't-go-way-far-back issue, too, but my memory is hasey, and also trampled all over by the bigger issue of it constantly popping me back up to the TOP of the feed every few moments as if to say "The ONLY thing that matters is what's coming in NOW!" and throwing away the older loaded tweets in the process, causing me to start yelling at the computer. oO

I have also not been able to find any kind of official TweetDeck forum to complain at, all the places TweetDeck itself points me to for help seem to be general-Twitter-related places, nothing TweetDeck-specific. :/