Pretty soon, Twitter is going to be a blog platform with all the changes it is making to its formerly vanilla 140-character format. First, it doubled tweet character counts to 280 characters. Now it has added a previously dubbed "tweetstorm" feature, which is officially called Threads.
Twitter has been testing the new addition for a few months, but finally launched Threads today. The name plays off the internal company vernacular of "threading" as the name for multiple tweets in a stream-of-consciousness post. Once users make a post, they can click the "+" icon to continue the thread. Once you have completed the thread, you can then "Tweet All."
If you"ve already published a thread, you can add a P.S. with the "Add another Tweet" button. You can also view threads with the obviously named "Show This Thread" button. A Twitter rep told TechCrunch that there is a tweet-grouping limit of 25 at the moment, but that could change based on how users flock to the feature.
"We know people also may want to serialize a longer story or thought, or provide ongoing commentary on an event or topic," Twitter Product Manager Sasank Reddy said in a blog post. "That"s where this update to threads comes in! You"ve been using threads in creative ways like these for years – the ways and reasons to thread your Tweets are limited only by your imagination."
The official rollout will happen over the next few weeks on Twitter.com, and through updates to the app on iOS and Android.
With hundreds of thousands of tweets per day, according to Twitter, the feature should make it easier to follow mega-threads that have become increasingly common on the social media site. It is the latest move by Twitter to try to track user feedback. It has previously implemented the @reply, RT, and hashtag functionality based on monitoring what users do.