I've been saying this for a little while now: Twitter should really try to capitalize on Tweetstorms. What they don't seem to realize is that Tweetstorms enable Twitter to be a kind of inverse annotation platform. Most annotation platforms enable large chunks of text to be dissected by readers, but a Tweetstorm is the opposite: the author specifies the exact segmentation of the text as they release it, and each segment can be individually commented on or shared. It forces authors to present their ideas as a sequence of small interlocking arguments. The medium enforces rhetorical granularity, for better or worse.

I can't be the only person who sees this potential. Come on, Twitter, build this out... I'll even let you hire me to work on it. :)

(Shameless plug) I've been working on an open-source tool to visualize twitter conversations and I've come to appreciate tweetstorms a bit more.

Here's this tweetstorm visualized with the tool: https://s3.amazonaws.com/aws-website-staticfiles-25g9k/tvp.h...

Wow that's cool! Making it obvious which branch is part of the actual storm rather than someone replying would be nice. Once zoomed in my avatar recognition doesn't work as well.

Or maybe the tweet storm is always the left most branch and I just didn't realise that? :)

In any case super cool stuff!

That's really cool. I've always found it difficult to follow discussions on Twitter. Maybe the UI is better for logged-in users but I've never bothered.

Twitter users find new ways to use the service, such as tweet storms or customer support, but the company fails to recognize these opportunities to "pave the cow paths" and improve there usability of their service.

What is there to build out? I guess it could be made more obvious for those that don't get it, but it's already being used in exactly the way you describe by Twitter's power users.

You're right that it's already usable, but it could be even better. For example:

1) Making it easier to compose Tweetstorms (third-party services like WriteRack exist, but it would be nice to have official support).

2) Enhancing the display of Tweetstorms to make them easier to follow. Right now, the UI for viewing Tweet replies is the same regardless of who's replying to who. Twitter could make it so that a person's replies to themselves (the building blocks of a Tweetstorm) have a unique look-and-feel compared to replies from followers. This would emphasize the Tweetstorm as a distinct type of posting, rather than something jury-rigged out of self-replies.

3) Not Tweetstorm specific, but make it easier to have and follow branched conversations. Sites like Reddit have this down already, while Facebook and Twitter seem reluctant to let anything go beyond one level down. Let people branch! It would actually make things easier to follow, and it would also allow for something (sort of) novel: branched Tweetstorms! Linear text is so 20th century! :)

What makes tweetstorms better than just letting people write long tweets? Tweetstorms infuriate me because they totally dominate my feed and ensure that the same tweet keeps being shoved back to the top of the timeline. Much better to let people write long tweets and just hide the part >140 characters behind an expand button. So I can safely ignore the whole thing.

The pacing of tweetstorms is what makes them unique. It's something fairly unique - if I wanted "longer tweets" I would go to Medium.

The timeline thing is a real(ish) problem that can be solved with UI, in a similar way how they show conversations inline (automatically collapse them)

Integrate it with W3C annotation standard, extending the standard to incorporate tweet storm strengths.

Whilst everyone is plugging their own stuff, we’ve been working on a little thing called Stormchaser for aggregating Tweetstorms in your timeline and lists: https://www.stormchaser.io

Because twitter is an insufficient blogging platform and normal blogs don't attract enough views people use tools to turn blogposts into tweets and tweets into blogposts.

This is a bit ridiculous. Not trying to demean your product, but it shouldn't be necessary to have it.

I'm a designer and I agree. The one quick improvement Twitter could make to the tweetstorm is to automatically (or giving the option to) remove the users handle when replaying to themselves when initiating the storm.

You can already reply to yourself and Your handle doesn't appear, does it? At least, it doesn't if I use the web interface.

Otherwise, this pic will give you a good idea of the changes Twitter is making to the tweet structure...

http://www.insider.gr/sites/default/files/57e01f4edd08956b5e...

Even if it does appear, you can simply remove it and Twitter will preserve the reply/threading regardless.

Same. My thought for this, and I wanted to build a media industry specific alternative to Twitter using it, was to allow a tweet/story to have depth/paging.

So, imagine your timeline is a regular, vertical stream. But any tweet could have paging on the horizontal axis, and you'd hit next or swipe to continue reading. Anyone browsing could read the opening tweet and ignore the rest if they wanted. Subsequent tweets within the first could have a video, image gallery, etc. Analytics would show the writer how many people delved how far into the content.

So, for a sports story, some people might scroll past, or read the first couple of sentences, but a strong fan would read every detail down through the analysis and stats.

Not sure why they haven't tried this. They could supplant some news that currently exists as links outside of the app.

> I wanted to build a media industry specific alternative to Twitter using it

Considering really the only people on Twitter is just Media people...

Which is why I'm surprised that the media lap it up rather than collectively building something they have more control over. Of course, it would take an industry organisation to arrange that and in my experience those bodies aren't really capable of doing something at that scale.

Are you familiar with Ted Nelson's hyperorthogonal data structures [0]?

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZigZag_(software)

Judging by the amount of noise I've heard recently on this topic you may be the only person who like that.

It's cute. It's part of the medium. Books must have pages. Tweetstorms must have 140char tweets.

>Tweetstorms must have 140char tweets.

seems to be matching the pacing of a graphic novel.

You know what, that's exactly it. The comparison of the pacing perfectly captures what makes it feel so unique.

I personally really hate these. There is always one or two good posts that hook me in but then the bias/politics/etc gets revealed when you read the rest. My friends retweet them but in the end I just think the author (and my duped friend) are idiots. Maybe it is just who I follow...

Why? I like the content of some tweetstorms, but the UI for them is just so bad I feel they'd be better off as a blog post if they're written contiguously.

(Exception I suppose is the live tweetstorm, where someone is just getting on their soapbox)