Monday marks the 10th anniversary of the first tweet ever to have been sent on the platform Twitter – see below.
just setting up my twttr
— Jack (@jack) 21 March 2006
Much has been written about Twitter in recent times, In quarter 4 2015, Twitter mentioned that the decline in active users came from both seasonality and its decision to reduce the volume of mail sent to dormant users to bring them back to the service. According to Twitter, the decline in active users was offset by the marketing spending in Q4. Basically, usage is declining and it has gone from being Facebook’s main social competitor of choice to almost one of the three of four others, struggling to keep some kind of clear identity. All of that said, it is still very popular in the UK but the younger generation are definitely preferring to face swap with Snapchat than tweet.
I personally like Twitter, and despite the fact it is often reported it doesn’t make any money, I still love the platform and find it useful as a power user. It’s advertising to date hasn’t been great but the back end of the platform is getting much better and it’s analytics has been a nice addition in recent years. The problem with Twitter now is noise, their is far too much noise on it still and far too many spam accounts. Twitter has never really nailed the spam follower numbers and apart from blocking people it is difficult to stop these accounts following you or your clients. Spam is a problem for a number of platforms worst of all Linkedin, if I get another connection request from a recruitment person I have never met I think I will scream. 
However, despite all of the business struggles I still thought Twitter might evolve and most importantly stay relevant but today the first nail in the coffin has been announced as Twitter revealed it is going to shut Tweetdeck for Windows from April 15th. I use Twitter on mobile, tablet and the Tweetdeck windows version. I have used other tools before but I like Tweetdeck and now that is going to the heavens as well. No doubt they have some plan to push more adverts into our feeds but I think this is a last ditch attempt to stop the dwindling active users and improve its image which is starting to head towards irrelevance.
The official statement said:
We’ve been working on infrastructure projects like this to ensure we have a stable foundation to continue improving TweetDeck in the future. Over the last year, we’ve shipped features such as TweetDeck Teams, group Direct Messages, and a confirmation step before Tweeting, as well as new search filters to make it easier to surface Vines, GIFs, Periscopes, and older content.
To better focus on enhancing your TweetDeck experience, we’ll no longer support a standalone Windows app. If you use Windows, you’ll still be able to visit TweetDeck on the web — nothing is changing about TweetDeck itself, just where you access it from. This change will take effect on April 15th.
So Tweetdeck will still be available in Chrome and on the web but if it is anything like the current web version I will be changing the tool I use as it is far too glitchy for what we do at Prohibition. We work for more than 15 brands on social media and a buggy, laggy web app is of no use to me. I hope this isn’t the beginning of the end but today it feels like it may not still be around in another 10 years.
