Twitter has been discovered to be working on a new feature that will allow users to unleash their own "tweetstorms."
The feature would give users another way to circumvent the 140-character limit of the social media app by making tweetstorms easier to write and release.
Tweetstorm Feature Hidden In Twitter App
Twitter users create tweetstorms by sending out a tweet and then chaining successive replies to that first one and to the succeeding tweets to create a thread of them. This allows the user to post an in-depth argument on a topic or to narrate a series of events.
The practice was popularized by tech investor Marc Andreessen, with the term then coined by another venture capitalist, Chris Dixon. Twitter is now apparently looking to make tweetstorms a formal part of the service, as a feature to create them has been discovered in the Android version of its app.
A Twitter user with the handle Devesh Logendran sent snapshots of the tweetstorm feature to The Next Web director of social media Matt Navarra. From the images, it appears that through the feature, users can type out their entire tweetstorm without minding the 140-character limit. The feature would then automatically separate the tweetstorm into up to 352 parts, which would mean a maximum of 49,280 characters, and then send out the tweetstorm as a thread.
TechCrunch contacted Twitter and received no comment on the rumored feature. There is no definite information on when the tweetstorm feature will launch, but TechCrunch learned that it is currently unavailable for public testing.
How Will This Help Twitter?
Tweetstorm are mostly used by celebrities, such as when Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently revealed updates on the Los Angeles tunnel that his Boring Company was creating to try to help out with the traffic situation. However, regular users have also been able to use tweetstorms to a great effect when narrating events, such as when a hilarious situation was unfolding nearby.
Tweetstorms are hard to do correctly, though, as one wrong reply would break up the chain and disperse it over the user's timeline. By making them into a formal feature on Twitter, users will no longer run into any issues when creating tweetstorms.
Transforming tweetstorms into a legitimate Twitter feature will also make the platform even more user-friendly, as the social media company looks to invite more users and to increase user engagement. The Twitter harassment policies have also been recently updated and the Twitter app redesigned to try to attract more people to open new accounts on the social media service.
