Take your deck.ly and shove it

Yep. I said it. Please. For gods sake everyone. Stop using the twitlonger/deck.ly/extenderthingy on Twitter. It’s annoying.

And by annoying, I mean that by using this added “functionality” you are actually destroying the functionality and flow of the tool itself. Twitter allows you to get the message in one hit. It’s not very consumable if you have to click away to an external browser to read the whole message. Twitter is 140 characters. 20 characters less then a standard text. It’s not hard to do.

I love Tweetdeck. I use it everyday and love to support a British company. I big it up when I can. But why deck.ly? If it was purely a URL shortner (like I set up for giffgaff (giff.ly) or setting up for myself (heather.ly)), I’d be OK. I’d think it was cute. But to encourage this browser/ app mess? Ugh.

Yes twitter is not for everyone. If you want to send a more detailed message, guess what? Take it off Twitter. You’ve got Facebook and email and even text messaging. Just because we can send huge text messages doesn’t mean the same needs to apply to Twitter. Maybe we could build it up and send 1000 word essay form tweets. But how about we just call it hotmail then?

If you want to violate the constraints of Twitter it’s OK but do it elsewhere. If you really need to DM me a message longer than 140 characters, then we shouldn’t be tweeting about it.

So keep it out of my stream. I mean it.

(PS. I was going to tweet this, but realised it was too long. Some people may have used deck.ly but I POSTED IT ON MY BLOG. Rant over.)