“Grrr,” I thought last night as I tried to log on to Hootsuite to schedule some tweets for later today.

But all was forgiven this morning when I logged in. Woohoo! Nice new shiny Hootsuite. Well not new exactly, but the app has added a couple of useful new features. 

Tracking ongoing conversations

First, Tweets with retweets now have a button “Show Conversation” that shows related tweets (with RT) below the initial tweet. Once you’re done reading through the tweets, you can click “Hide Conversation.” Nice.

Selecting accounts with a click

Second, Ping.fm has been added to the accounts to select from when choosing which to Tweet (this used to be managed in the background by setting up Ping.fm (see Ten steps to becoming a Twitter power user with Hootsuite #3: use multiple profiles)

The bug

And the bug. It’s not a big deal, but needs to be fixed. The column for “Pending Tweets” shows a missing image icon instead of the account’s icon.

Kudos to Hootsuite

Another change is that columns now have the Twitter logo, but I’m not quite sure how that works. But overall kudos to Hootsuite for improving the (still free!) application. These are more improvements that reinforce its position as the best browser-based solution for managing your Twitter accounts.