If you’ve got a lot to say, Twitter isn’t the ideal medium on which to say it, in much the same way that War and Peace would have taken Tolstoy a lot longer if he had to resort to 3,000-foot high skywriting. Still, for whatever reason, people do love breaking Twitter’s 140 (and more recently 280) character limit with streams of consciousness that should probably be saved for the more easily ignored blog post.
Threaded tweets – or tweetstorms as they were quickly christened – was the Twitter community’s hacked solution: replying to your own tweet would allow the responses to be linked, and read by anyone who clicked the original. It looks a little like this:
(Yes, yes, I know: save it for the autobiography.)
Well, like hashtags, @replies and retweets, this community hack has been adopted by Twitter and is now supported by the official Twitter app. Just start writing a tweet, and press the plus button to add an additional thought that doesn’t fit within the character limit. Repeat until you have nothing left to say, or your battery runs out – whichever comes first.
Twitter is also changing the way threads display, where users can see the first two or three when expanded and will have the option to “show this thread” if they enjoyed the early taster. Interestingly, this feature seems to have been added to Tweetstorms created the old-fashioned way, and there’s even a handy button reading “add another tweet” on the website, should you wish to add to an earlier masterpiece.
The rollout will be coming to iOS, Android and desktop in the coming weeks.
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