Now You Can Tweet A Twitter Thread All In One Go

Back in September, Techzim wrote on Twitter’s plans of introducing a feature that makes tweeting threads much much easier and it’s here now!

If you’re a Twitter user and your English teacher didn’t do well in teaching you how to summarise (yes, not your fault), you probably were super excited when Twitter increased the character limit per tweet to 280 from 140. Now not only have they doubled the characters per tweet, they’ve enabled the ease of making a tweetstorm.

A Tweetstorm, in Twitter language is basically a series of sequential tweets that are connected. Some call them Twitter threads, in fact that’s the commonly used term.

The new feature is enabled in the latest version of Twitter. However, for now, on mobile the feature seems to only be available on some accounts (on verified accounts from what I see, but that’s just my assumption). The feature is still being rolled out on mobile (Android, iOS, Windows), but on desktop the feature is already available for everyone.

To create a Twitter thread, simply compose your first tweet then instead of hitting the ‘tweet’ button, just hit the plus (+) button and compose the next. You can continue with this process until you have tweeted everything you want to tweet then  finally hit the ‘tweet all’ button.

In the case that you sent out a tweetstorm but then realised something was missing, you still can add another tweet to the thread – this is the closest to editing a tweet that Twitter has ever come. To do this (add a tweet to your thread that is), tap on ‘add another tweet’ to the already existing thread, then compose the tweet and voila.

Twitter also announced the addition of a ‘show thread’ button. This is useful in indicating the tweets that are a thread. Remember you kinda had to notify people that the tweet is a thread otherwise before checking out the replies it all just seemed as if you had made an incomplete tweet that people replied to. Though of course for those who’ve been in the Twitter world long enough, it was quite obvious.

Nonetheless, I personally feel that the more Twitter makes the changes of increasing the maximum characters, making threads easier etc, they will lose their essence. See to some, the most interesting thing about Twitter is the challenge of compressing your thoughts into limited characters and the inability to edit a tweet. Not editing a tweet just encourages you to do it right and do it right the first time otherwise having to delete and re-tweet means you lose your prior engagements and there lies the thrill!

Anyway, that’s just me… what do you think?