I’m really starting to get pissed off with TweetDeck right now.

It’s bad enough that they canned the proprietary groups in favor of the API-draining lists, but now the damn application doesn’t even display lists properly.

Take a look at these snapshots below (click for bigger version).

Here’s a view of one of my lists at twitter.com. Lots of recent updates from various Tweeters.

And this is what TweetDeck’s been showing me for the last few hours. All my “public” lists are completely devoid of updates. The “private” lists actually load up fine (they’re off screen), but for some reason TweetDeck doesn’t want to show me updates from any of my public lists (which accounts for 90% of them).

The “all friends” group is fine, which means if they were still using proprietary groups I’d be seeing all my updates.

There’s an avalanche of complaints in TweetDeck’s support forums about all of this, all of which are currently falling on deaf ears. A bit of a shame. TweetDeck was one of the better desktop Twitter clients. Unfortunately the only realistic alternative is Seesmic and that’s even more problematic for slightly different but nevertheless frustrating reasons.

TweetDeck, it’s very simple. PUT PROPRIETARY GROUPS BACK IN. The code’s actually still in there, because TweetDeck 0.32.1 will play nice with your previously created groups. It’s when you delete them in favor of lists and discover you can’t recreate them that the problems begin.