I switched to TweetDeck from Seesmic a long time ago. Unfortunately, news came out yesterday that Twitter is pretty much killing all the good things that were leftover from TweetDeck. Both the iPhone and Android apps are dead and will be removed from their app stores soon, and the TweetDeck AIR app, which most of us still hang on to, will no longer work, as it relies on an old version of the Twitter API. All this won’t happen until May, but if it’s dead, it’s dead, so I figured I might as well find another solution.
TweetDeck isn’t entirely going away – Twitter has stated they’ll be giving lots of attention to the web versions, including the TweetDeck for Chrome app. I’ve already got this installed, so I figured I’d dig in and see if it has the features I’ve come to rely on.
I don’t care for the interface, but I was able to find one feature that I haven’t been able to find in any other Twitter client, regardless of platform – the ability to match keywords in a stream.
Sounds silly, right? Here’s the use-case: SXSW. I’m going to be there, and I’d love to be able to connect with people that I follow on Twitter who are also at SXSW. The problem is, the #SXSW hashtag is completely ridiculous, and not something that anyone would want to follow.
So how do I see what people in my timeline that I’m following are doing at or saying about SXSW?
Most Twitter apps have a mute filter, but they don’t have a match filter, which TweetDeck for Chrome does. To set this up, simply add a new column of your timeline. Then, click the ‘Edit’ button in the top right of the column, and you’ll get these options:
As you can see, I’ve put the ‘#sxsw’ hashtag in the ‘matching’ field. This will strip out any tweets in my timeline that don’t include that hashtag. Because it’s not a search stream, it won’t show all the other nonsense that people tag with #sxsw, just the tweets from people that I follow.
This will also be awesome for product launches – I don’t care about the 15 articles from The Verge (note: I love the Verge), or the promoted tweets from the manufacturer. I want to know what my timeline is saying about this product.
Here’s a side-by-side of my normal timeline vs my ‘#sxsw timeline’
How will you use matching in your TweetDeck streams?
Ricky Cadden 
I’ve been trying to use Windows 8 apps but still nothing great has arrived, especially for free. I’m using Tweetro right now, but can’t rely on it. I started using the chrome web app recently for Tweetdeck, and i’m enjoying it so far. I think I’ll be using this mostly from now on.