Twitter is to communication with the haiku is to poetry. The constraint of using 140 characters to convey a complete thought requires that we distill that thought down to the very base of what we want to communicate. Sometimes, try as we might, that’s just not possible and we end up sending 2 successive tweets. I’m alright with that but it’s not always the best route of delivery for, say, a news outlet who needs their headline and link to be complete in a single tweet. Enter Deck.ly.
Essentially, Deck.ly allows people to type longer tweets that can be read, in their entirety, within TweetDeck. Great news for TweetDeck users, right? For the rest of us? Not so much.
I currently use HootSuite and every time I see a Deck.ly tweet come through my stream, I cringe a little bit. I know that if I want to read what’s behind that tweet, I have to click on the Deck.ly link to pull the tweet out of HootSuite then I have to click on the Deck.ly link again to read the complete tweet then I have to click on any info link included in the tweet to see what’s going on.
The ensuing clickfest that follows a Deck.ly sighting is bad enough on my Mac, but it’s torture on my phone and here’s what’s happening: I’m choosing to ignore Deck.ly tweets from those of you who overuse the tool. When I don’t read your tweets, I don’t share them.
The danger of Deck.ly is that your lazy over-reliance on a worthwhile tool is losing you my attention and my reach. Don’t make me work so hard to read what you have to say every time you tweet. Use Deck.ly, but use it responsibly. That’s all I’m asking.
~ Image from Creative Commons-licensed photo by cgines
