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Twitter is giving TweetDeck some much-needed love with GIF, poll, and emoji support

Twitter is giving TweetDeck some much-needed love with GIF, poll, and emoji support

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Finally, a bit more feature parity between core Twitter and TweetDeck

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Illustration by Michele Doying / The Verge

TweetDeck is getting some much-needed core Twitter features, the company announced today, including native support for GIFs, polls, and emoji. These features have long been a part of the desktop version of Twitter and, before it got shut down last year, the dedicated Mac app version. But TweetDeck has for years languished in the periphery of Twitter’s product road map, getting new features late or not at all.

Now, after polling users yesterday on the missing features people would most like to see incorporated into TweetDeck, the company said it would be bringing the above mentioned new elements as well as support for threads and image tagging to TweetDeck. It’s just a test for now, but we should expect the new features to arrive at some point in the coming months.

It’s not that TweetDeck is really suffering from not having these features. After all, you can drop in emoji you copy from another text field, and you can drag in GIF files from your desktop if you feel like it. You can also always create a poll from the desktop version of the site, which you’ve been able to view in TweetDeck (but not create) since June 2017. But it’s a gesture of goodwill from Twitter to bring these features to TweetDeck, if only to show that the app is still in its good graces.

Twitter has had a habit of buying products, incorporating core features into its main app, and then either killing or ignoring the services that made those features popular in the first place. Take Vine and its eventual demise as a good example of Twitter’s biggest failed opportunity or Periscope as its most out-of-style.

But TweetDeck, which the company acquired back in 2011, has remained a kind of bastion of alternative Twitter use that inexplicably feels untouched by the company’s core wants and needs. There’s no telling when or if Twitter ever will bring the axe down on the app. But announcements like these give dedicated TweetDeck users some hope that the day is, at the very least, not happening anytime soon.