Tweetdeck Shatters the 140 Character Limit With Deck.ly

Tweetdeck users no longer have to agonize over word choice or leave off an important @celeb because of Twitter's 140 character limit. 

With Deck.ly, which Tweetdeck announced today, users can post messages as long as they want. Other Tweetdeck users will see the whole message, while those on Twitter will get a truncated message with a link to the post on Deck.ly. 

"I’ve been very protective of the fact that [140 characters] is a platform limitation of the services we sit on top of and we have to have an element of respect for that," says Tweetdeck founder and CEo Ian Dodsworth. "Going around that core tenet of Twitter could be a sensitive move. We don’t know how they feel about it. But we are tailoring to an audience that wants functionality the general user of Twitter doesn’t care about."

The 140 character limit is a relic of Twitter's origins as an SMS application. But the brevity of messages has also defined the metabolism of the service, playing a large role in propelling it to the pole position as the source for real time information. 

Increasingly Twitter is at war with the third party clients that allow users to post and read from the site. This is a shot across the bow from Tweetdeck, offering some serious differentiation.

“Let’s be honest – we are competing with Twitter on a daily basis,” Mr Dodsworth says. “We are fighting for the people that use the same service. Our users are a higher level and they want more – those are people that Twitter doesn’t want to compete for.” Sounds like Tweetdeck has the market on blow-hards cornered. 

bpopper [at] observer.com | @benpopper