Tweets – not only are they short and sweet, they’re punchy and get a message across in very few words, which also makes them easy to read. They’re the bursts of fire from individuals engaged in the war of ideas. Tweetstorms, a term coined years ago by Marc Andreessen from Silicon Valley, is a series of Tweets fired off consecutively. A user-created method of numbering your Tweets so that you can convey a larger idea to your followers.
Twitter has rolled out a new feature to make it easier to send, edit, and follow a tweetstorm.
What is this new feature you speak of?
You’ll notice the new plus (+) button next to Tweet when you go to post. After you have used up your new 280-character limit, click the plus (+) button to keep the flow going. Want to come back to your tweetstorm and add more Tweets? Easy, go to your tweetstorm posts and "Add another Tweet." So far, you can add up to 25 posts to your tweetstorm. Twitter has even helped us out by adding a “show this thread” label to your tweetstorm. Now everyone can pull up the entirety of your rant.
This new feature should make sending a group of Tweets much simpler in the hope of encouraging more people to tweetstorm. It appears to be Twitter’s belief that it’s the longer posts, not the shorter ones, which get more views.
I suppose that’s fairly evident in platforms like Facebook, but is that why people use Twitter?
On Tuesday, December 12, Twitter posted “At Twitter, we have a history of studying how people use our service and then creating features to make what they’re doing easier, a few years ago we noticed people creatively stitching Tweets together to share more information or tell a longer story.
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What could it mean for Twitter users?
It’s highly possible that you will receive a barrage of Tweets from multiple accounts that you’re following. This could get a bit spammy. Especially if you’re not interested in reading a long series of Tweets. After all, this is supposed to be Twitter – the ultimate microblogging platform, otherwise, you’d probably be over on Facebook or Reddit.
Another concern is the way the thread is captured. For those who love to express their right to free speech, it could mean an additional avenue for upset folks to collate and complain. Composing your controversial ideas into threads exposes people to a larger volume of "offensive content." Be ready for the increase of takedowns.
Obviously, used the right way, tweetstorms could have an important place, especially in delivering important newscasts and emergency warnings. Still, we had this covered Jack.