Did TweetDeck Just Ruin Twitter For Us All?

One thing I like to teach is that if you want someone to do something, make it as easy as possible for them to do it. Sometimes this advice can backfire when it comes to something that you DON’T want people to do.

TweetDeck, recently voted the Best Twitter Client by Lifehacker readers, and my personal favorite, recently launched a new service called Deck.ly, which allows you to post tweets that are longer than the usual 140-character limit… in a way.

Whenever you use TweetDeck to tweet a long message, TweetDeck will automatically cut off your message near the standard limit, adding a short url to a deck.ly page with the entire message. People can also leave comments on that page, which is more like a short blog post than a tweet.

Deck.ly is turned on in TweetDeck by default (and can now be turned off, not the case initially), and that alone explains why so many people are using it. See for yourself by Twitter-searching “deck.ly” and wait for 30 seconds to see hundreds if not thousands of new tweets appear with deck.ly urls.

So is this a good thing? I tweeted a poll, and here’s what people had to say:

To sum up:

1. Deck.ly isn’t supported on iOS, so you’re just frustrating some of your followers by using it
2. Using Deck.ly defeats the philosophy of Twitter to keep messages short and sweet
3. It’s a cop-out that lets people be lazy and ramble on BUT sometimes you just do need that extra space
4. Deck.ly paradoxically forces you to leave Twitter to enjoy its tweets
5. And I’ll add in: you get no notification of comments left on Deck.ly’s tweet pages (yet), unlike when someone responds to your actual tweets

I remember the first time I saw a non-Deck.ly long tweet on Twitter a few years ago. It was so out of place that I thought Twitter had been hacked.

Taking advantage of the fact that less people are blogging in favor of tweets & status messages, TweetDeck was smart to create its own copycat service of XLTweet or Long Tweets. We might not like it, and it’s not yet a good idea to use it, but we may as well get used to it.

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