Twitter is testing a feature for creating tweetstorms

midian182

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While Donald Trump’s use of the platform for official policy statements has helped Twitter stay relevant (and increased its popularity as a news source), the microblogging site is still trying to appeal to new users. Increasing the sacrosanct 140-character tweet limit will likely never happen, but the service is testing a feature that makes it easier to create the next best thing: tweetstorms.

Composing a thread of related tweets involves replying to each one of your posts in succession. It allows users to go on lengthy tirades, tell stories, or simply write something with a high word count, all without linking to an external blog such as Medium – which some users may not be willing to visit. While creating a tweetstorm isn’t difficult, the company has built an unlaunched feature that makes it even easier.

A user going by the alias Devesh Logendran found the hidden feature in the Android version of the Twitter app and shared some screenshots with TNW’s Director of social media, Matt Navarra. They show how it breaks text up into individual tweets before posting them all at once, meaning the messages won’t confusingly appear all over users’ timelines, and nobody can reply to a tweet before the tweetstorm is finished.

Twitter told TechCrunch it had “no comment to share on the record,” when asked about the feature. While we do know it’s not currently available for public testing, there’s no word on when or if it’ll be publicly released.

Facebook fans who find Twitter’s post limitation off-putting may welcome such a feature, but those who love the way 140 characters inspires brevity may argue against its implementation.

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