TweetDeck Hidden Gem: Translated Tweets

cc licensed flickr photo by me! (do I need to attribute myself? will I sue myself?

This was not the photo I wished I had taken at Northern Voice 2009. There was a moment in the back of the auditorium, during one of the big keynote sessions, when I glance at all the open laptops- more than 50% were open to TweetDeck.

I like discovering new tech tool features just be poking around. In Tweetdeck, when you mouse over the icon of someone’s message, you get 4 useful buttons- one to reply, one to direct message, and one called “Other Actions”… I’ve never even looked at that last one:

There are a bunch of things you can do there! You can follow/unfollow said user, link to their profile, add them to a TweetDeck group, and this is neat- search will create a new column that searches twitter for all mentions of that person (what you don’t already have a column set up to search for jimgroom?).

And that is just one part, Under the “Tweet” menu, I saw one for “Translate”

At first I thought it might allow me to, say translate Jim Groom’s tweets into Russian, but it seems like it does nothing– until you notice at the top where the status reads “This tweet is already translated into your preferred language” [idiot]. Ah, so its purpose is to allow you to read tweets in languages you dont read (which are all but one for me). So I ran a tweet deck search on “Italian” hoping to find something tweeted in Italian and not “OMG I just spilled Italian dressing on Brittany’s pants!”

So here is a tweet in a language I don’t know:

and using the “Other Actions” -> Tweet -> Translate converts it to English for me

Shazam! I can now me maginally less world ignorant, thanks to TweetDeck’s built in translation.

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