Hoot Hoot, Tweet Tweet!

I recently went through a revamp of how I live my online life from email to twitter.  This post will be dedicated to my switch from TweetDeck to Hootsuite.

Upon announcing to Twitter that I was trying a new nest with Hootsuite, I got the question of why?  Honestly, I don't have any reason why I am tired of Tweetdeck.  It's a great platform.  It does seem to have a ridiculous amount of updates though.  If I had to give one reason why I wanted something new, it would be that I just wanted something new.  I get tired of looking at the same thing on my screen every day and for whatever reason, I was done with Tweetdeck.  I also heard of a lot of friends moving over to Hootsuite and I was curious.

Hootsuite is entirely web-based so there isn't a client like Tweetdeck.  At first I wasn't so sure about this because I get annoyed by having an endless amount of tabs open in my browser (Google Chrome).  I got over that pretty quick though (it brought on some changes in other areas that I mentioned above which may appear in a blog post later).

Overall, the positives of Hootsuite are:

• I like the show conversation button in each tweet that breaks down the conversation of @replies over a course of time right in the window of the stream.
• I also like that there is an upgrade for google analytics to monitor my stats for an additional 5.99 per month.  Personally, I don't use this feature as I don't much care at this point what my stats are and I can use twittercounter if I really need to know, but it is a cool feature to have in my opinion.  
• I like the sound it makes when a new tweet comes in.  I got a little sick of the sound of Tweetdeck (as did everyone around me).  
• It seems like things are better organized.  When you click on a person's name it opens a window on top of your feed rather than in a new column like Tweetdeck does.  I prefer that because I can still see what is going on.  Profile glances also seem more detailed.  It just seems easier to find things compared to Tweetdeck.  
• Updates are done without downloads and reinstalls.  THANK YOU!!
• It's very easy to add additional accounts like Facebook, etc.
• Managing twitter lists seems way easier to me.  Faster to add/delete tweeps as needed.
• You can download a browser extension which helps you easily post weblinks to Twitter.
• When you're inactive for an hour, a cute little sleeping owl comes up and asks if you want to wake up. (yeah...corny, but I like corny stuff)

The negatives, in my opinion are:

• The tab keeps flashing that I have new tweets which is growing annoying. There may be an option to fix it but I haven't found that yet. 
• The preferences are lacking. I think they could offer more options for customization.  
• The biggest downfall is that I can't hit enter after typing a tweet, I have to click on the submit button.  That's highly annoying but I'm trying to deal with it.  
• You can't multiple @reply...meaning I can't click on a bunch of people in my @column to reply to them at one time. I either have to do them individually or type each name in.  Very annoying.  

I would recommend you to take a peek and decide for yourself.  For me, those multiple @ replies and submit button are two things that might get too annoying but I like the ease of use of everything else so much, I just might stick with it for a while.  Hopefully Hootsuite is paying attention and will do an upgrade to accomodate my needs.