When good apps go somewhat bad

Sometimes, a product upgrade isn't altogether a good thing. Take, for example, TweetDeck.

TweetDeck is a popular Twitter client -- one which, I might add, I've used for a few weeks now and which I recently reviewed enthusiastically in a roundup of Twitter apps. It lets you view your Twitter, Facebook and MySpace feeds in separate columns; you can also create groups of accounts you are following, or do searches... In other words, if you're a Twitter user, this is a very cool app.

Just before the review was ready to go live, TweetDeck upgraded to a new 3.0 version. I tried it out and it looked good -- it offered increased Facebook functionality, letting users comment directly from TweetDeck; it reorganized its icons in a logical and, I thought, perfectly fine method... It was, I thought, all good.

Mea culpa -- I was wrong.

After a week of wrestling with TweetDeck 3.0, I'm seriously thinking of reinstalling version 2.5. I've had a couple of serious issues with the new version (for example, it's tendency to "forget" which feeds I was following during the last session). But the most frustrating is TweetDeck's new way of shortening URLS.

Previously, the process was simple and sweet: You pasted an URL into a separate box, clicked on an icon, and TweetDeck obediently shortened the URL and dropped it at the end of your tweet. Unfortunately, the creators of TweetDeck decided to get fancy, and now the app "automatically" shortens URLs. Nice idea -- but more often than not, when I paste my URL into the field, it just sits there.

I'm not the only TweetDeck user who's annoyed. Fellow Computerworld editor Ken Mingis, who uses the app on a Mac (I'm a PC person), has complained that, "The auto-shorten URLs has been flakey and doesn't always work, and TweetDeck seems to interfere with dragging and dropping files to the desktop."

The point of this isn't that TweetDeck is a bad app -- it certainly isn't. There's a good chance that these issues are temporary, or confined to only a few users. And with any luck, they'll be fixed soon.

But I really, really wish that smart folks who create great apps would refrain from the temptation to "improve" applications until they're either too unwieldy, or too complicated, or just plain don't work.