Twitter. Some people love it, some people don’t see the point. Others, like me, don’t see the point, make a song and dance about deleting their account, then sheepishly create a new one months later and admit that everyone else was right. Not my problem, Twitter must have got better in the interim.

But I think we can all agree that Twitter’s appeal lies in its short and sweet format. The 140-character limit is what makes “following” someone so appealing: it keeps things snappy, streamlined and often surprisingly creative. Even the most interesting Twitter user will post tweets that aren’t for you; the key is that every tweet is short and sweet and as easily skippable as any other.

At least it was, until a light bulb pinged on above the head of some bright spark at TweetDeck. Yes, its new deck.ly feature lets you keep typing beyond that 140th character. Instead of a warning red – you’re droning on… – you get an encouraging green: keep typing, you really are fascinating!

While visitors to your feed on the Twitter website will see a truncated tweet with the now-familiar URL link to the rest – a feature that I already find annoying – other TweetDeck users will see the first 310 characters of the tweet, followed by a Read more link that opens the full tweet in a popup.

It takes up the space of two standard tweets in your stream, so while the tweeter blathers on regardless, it’s the follower whose experience is impacted – and as far as I can see there’s no way to disable the feature, even if you don’t need or want it for your own tweets.

Worse than that, if this catches on and the huge number of TweetDeck users take it to their hearts, anyone not using the client could soon find their 140-character Twitter feeds clogged up with half-finished fragments. If it’s an attempt to get everyone onto TweetDeck, I pray it fails miserably.

I’m not against progress or innovation. I’m not going to campaign to stop people writing long tweets that spill over to a URL if that’s what they desperately want to do. In the previously perfect world I could simply skip over those few in the same way I do when Barry sends his hourly ode to Justin Bieber.

But I’m already seeing tweets of double length since the TweetDeck update began rolling out, and so far I’ve not seen one that wouldn’t have been improved by the existing character limit. Perhaps it comes from editing words for a living. Perhaps I’ll come to see the merit in more freedom on Twitter. I don’t think so.

For now all it’s succeeded in doing is make me want to uninstall TweetDeck, which is surely the opposite of what a feature update should achieve. So, in 140 characters or less… anyone know a good Twitter client?

UPDATE: Victory! As of update v0.37.3 TweetDeck will stop the double-height tweets, as well as give you the option of disabling deck.ly for your own tweets. It would appear I wasn’t alone in complaining!