Speaker Deck for Sharing Presentations

It has become common practice to make presentation slides available for those unable to attend in person, or for more in-depth review later. The most popular service to do this is of course Slideshare. Slideshare is a fine service, but the website has become fairly cluttered over the years, and visuals are of course important when it comes to presentations.

Speaker Deck is an alternative to Slideshare with a focus on “simplicity and beauty”. The service has the features you would expect:

• upload presentations (currently in PDF only)
• view presentations, including fullscreen mode
• share presentations, including downloads and embedding

Speaker Deck was announced last September and is free to use. It would be helpful if Speaker Deck allowed the upload of Powerpoint or Keynote files, making it easier to reuse the slides. But the big item on my wish list is an improvement of the social activities enabled around a presentation. I want to see download counts, comments, number of tweets and Facebook likes, and I want an API for them. Ordered List, the company behind Speakerdeck, was acquired by Github in December, turning Speaker Deck into a Github product. This makes me confident that we will see these Speaker Deck improvements rather sooner than later.

To see a few Speaker Deck presentations, go to my presentations or the Science category.