The sequence of events that inspired this micro-drama is as follows: Firstly, Jakob Nielsen decided to talk about iterative designs in tweets (or as he likes to dress them up: “stream-based postings”). He guides us through a process where in only five easy steps he has drained the blood from a sample tweet, leaving a dried husk that will rise in thirteen days to join the legions of humorless drones that find the useit.com design both fascinating and useful.

After this, Jeff Croft cuts through the meat of Jakob’s ‘findings’ with a tweet that probably did not require five iterations: “An article by Jacob Nielsen on how to take all the spontaneity and humaneness out of your tweets in five easy steps…”

Granted, at least one iteration more might have helped in his case to get Jakob spelled right.

The fact is, Jeff hit it on the head. If you’re writing down your tweets and re-writing them repeatedly to maximize some sort of marketing message, you’re not tweeting. I’m not sure what you’re doing, but I’ll bet that most people that see the message can see what it is, canned artificial crap. You don’t have a medium of micro-messages just to waste all the time and effort of a proper e-mail or blog post on a single sentence. Spending that effort on the message not only is contrary to the purpose of the medium, it’s counterproductive when the end result is what Nielsen presents, complete with shouting-style caps, months in parentheses, and different wording to make it “punchier.”

I’m going to say Jakob Nielsen does not know what “punchier” actually means. If he did, useit.com might not look like a canary got stuck in a mid-90′s school administration newsletter.

Tweet how you like, but if you spend a half-hour at a time maximizing your tweets in some sort of business formula, don’t be surprised when people stop paying attention to your massaged marketing attempts.