In my review of TweetDeck 1.0, I neglected to discuss a feature that was cut, mostly because I never used it.
Deck.ly, the long-tweet service was mercifully axed. Ever since Twitter acquired the company in May, I had assumed the service would eventually be shuttered.
One of my favorite parts of Twitter as a service is that it is both limiting and limitless. Limiting because a tweet is limited to 140 characters or fewer, but limitless because of the power of links.
Deck.ly, like other long-tweet services, proved to be more of an annoyance than helpful. While there were hooks within the app to display a full tweet, for users of other apps it would just show a link to a deck.ly Web page with the full tweet.
To its credit, it was the quickest way to generate what amounts to a blog post from the app. It was no frills, but the tweets that were generated from it didn't have a good way of cutting off; the tweet would just end mid-sentence.
I can see how a bunch of TweetDeck users who might find this change annoying. Andy Carvin, NPR's senior strategist covering events in the Middle East, would quickly paste in, say, a statement from a government for easy reading. Now, people like Carvin will have to find another way.
That other way? Just get a blog. There are plenty of free blogging services that are just as easy to craft quick posts and automatically post to Twitter. Tumblr and WordPress both support this natively, so these are great options. They take a few seconds to open and, as long as you have to a Web browser, are dead-simple to post in. Plus, blogs come with the added benefit of editing.
Deck.ly's death is a sign that Twitter is sticking with what works for it: short bursts of thoughts, with the added benefit of being able to link out. Overall, shedding Deck.ly was a good move.