"Twitter is well aware that they need to offer similar functionlity In the meantime, you can get it in tweetdeck" - Fred Wilson

Good to hear that Twitter is aware that "value = better signal to noise ratio" - Cliff Gerrish

I suppose that also means that TweetDeck's goose is cooked. - Cliff Gerrish

Fred what is the similar functionality available in TweetDeck? Groups? - Steve Gillmor

sorry Dave. track that isn't realtime isn't track - Steve Gillmor

haven't used it but wanted to make sure Fred wasn't claiming TweetDeck does track. Apparently not. - Steve Gillmor

Dave, agreed. It's almost not necessary to follow people any more but information stream, and quite honestly just in time works for me. Not everything needs to be real time unless you're doing financial trading or something along those lines. - Deepak Singh

if that's true, wonder whether or why not Twhirl has the same API access. Loic? - Steve Gillmor

@steve - yes: Twhirl does something similar but Tweetdeck makes it easier to consume - Dennis Howlett

Dave, Jon Udell (channeling Jeff Jonas) once said "data finds the data, then people find people". Your usage of Tweetdeck definitely fits in with that, and is how I use Twitter now for the better part. Very effective and great for work too to pick up on chatter. - Deepak Singh

yes Dennis I know. I'm trying to understand how close this comes to real track. Dustin Sallings, do you know? - Steve Gillmor

When Twitter offers the same service in real time, what will TweetDeck's value proposition be?Will Twitter allow API clients to directly compete in real time? (for a price?) - Cliff Gerrish

@steve: I'm less concerned with real time in the way you are. I'm more concerned about 'right time' which is a slightly different concept. I find that what I can get from the 'groups' style of functionality works very well. MSFT did a good job on this at MIX09 I thought. None of this is perfect - Tweets still disappear etc but the delivery to date has been good enough. My sense is the group>topic mode is good enough. - Dennis Howlett

Dennis yes, we think differently. No, track is not back. If twitter is coming back to the table, that's good. if not, I'll wait. - Steve Gillmor

cliff, playing favorites is a form of price competition if in fact that's happening. Hard to tell right now - Steve Gillmor

@steve - that's fair enough. All I can say is those concepts are proving acceptable in the use cases we've identified for ESME. If Track offers significant improvement then sure... - Dennis Howlett

Wilson seems to say Tweetdeck is a stopgap. Eventually it will be replaced by native and better Twitter functionality.Training users to be satisfied with slightly better service, trains them to recognize the real thing when Twitter makes it available. - Cliff Gerrish

Louis Gray on FB to me: "TweetDeck does not do Track. It simply leverages the Search Twitter function for keywords, and is limited by the API, like everybody else." - Steve Gillmor

@cliff: that's a bit disingenuous on Wilson's part. The implied assumption is that TD does no further development while Twitter plays catch up. More important, is Wilson signaling that Twitter might develop alternative clients ot the existing web offering? - Dennis Howlett

Track is good, as long as track-block is not put in with it to prevent system feedback and backtalk. - Prokofy Neva

Authors of popular desktop clients are in an interesting position. They can effectively bypass all of twitter's rate limit controls (and get pretty close to RT track) by what is effectively a distributed attack. It's a dumb way to do it, for sure, but nobody else has that kind of distribution. - Dustin Sallings

Dave: Try out im@twitterspy.org via xmpp -- You just tell it what you are interested in and it tells you when people talk about it. No special software to run, no overhead on your part. But it can be delayed, and it's throttled at 20k req/hr. You'll see the experience and just have to imagine what it was like when it was run by people with access to all the data. - Dustin Sallings

net: nothing has changed, track not back. FB, FriendFeed may get there soon, which may bring Twitter track back. - Steve Gillmor