TweetDeck Arrives on Android

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Starting this Thursday, popular social media management tool TweetDeck will be available as an Android app. The company is opening its beta program in the morning, and we were lucky enough to get our hands on a copy tonight.

We’ve tried other Android apps that have promised varying degrees of functionality and features for social media work and play; we’ve experienced varying degrees of satisfaction so far with all of them.

The TweetDeck app for Android is still “very beta,” a.k.a. lacking the polish you’d expect from a completely finished application. We tried playing around with it a bit tonight; while we’ll be delighted when more mature builds are available, we still think the app has breathtaking potential.

It integrates Facebook, Twitter, Buzz and Foursquare accounts into a single application. Updates are color-coded and presented in a single, blended column. There’s also a “Me” column for reviewing all your Twitter @replies and comments and like for your Facebook posts.

To give you an idea of what the app will look like, here are the signin and Home screens:


And here’s what a Foursquare venue screen and Twitter profile page look like:
Overall, the UI is clean and optimized for mobile displays — and the way updates are pulled is easier on battery life than having a constantly running, real-time stream of data.

And we’ve got to hand it to the developers and designers at TweetDeck for giving Android users even more fun and useful features than are currently available on the iPhone version of TweetDeck, which doesn’t yet support Foursquare or Buzz. But this Android app is a clear signal of where the company’s Apple-focused applications will be headed.

In future iterations of the app, TweetDeck hopes to add improved map performance, better handling for multiple Twitter accounts, video upload capabilities and better integration with Android hardware.

Check the company’s website in a few more hours for details on how you can be part of its Android beta program, and definitely let us know what you think of the app in the comments.