I was lucky to be one of the first 5000 people to get access to test out a new version of TweetDeck called “User Stream Preview.” In this preview build is the ability to use Twitter’s new Streaming API which essentially turns the Twitter firehose on full blast.
In the past, you were at the mercy of Twitter’s API limits, which started pretty low but have been increasing over the past year or so. More recently, Twitter applications which use the Oath service (for authentication) were allowed higher API limits. For me, however, I continued to hit those limits, especially since I was checking my Twitter feeds from a variety of applications. “API limit exceeded” was something that I was really tired of seeing. Now, with TweetDeck coupled with the Streaming API, I never get to see that error message again, at least not in TweetDeck.
Contrary to what is mentioned in the TechCrunch article below, not everything has been enabled (or is working) for the Streaming API. You can see new Followers and @ Replies real-time, but things like Lists and Searches haven’t yet been super-charged I don’t believe.
When I first fired up the new version of TweetDeck, I was like a deer in the headlights watching the people I follow’s Tweets go flying by. If you scroll down on the column, you can actually pause the refresh (the tweets still come in but you can slowly catch up on what you are reading). As soon as you scroll back to the top of the column, then the real-time action starts again.
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