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Comment by johns | Hacker News Reader

I hope using a tweetstorm to announce his departure was a subtle shot at the company's inability to ship a product the way people want to use it.

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FWIW, he used our product http://writerack.com to do his Tweetstorm.

I feel great!!

Why are you getting downvoted? People seriously need to lighten up ;)

Yes, of course it's totally fine for people to post their excitement about something like that. It may be a tangent, but it's a specific, interesting tangent, not the generic kind of off-topic discussion which is predictable. Also, there's a huge difference between a community member sharing excitement with fellow users vs. someone showing up just to promote something.

But note that OoTheNigerian's comment eventually became upvoted (hugely upvoted in fact). That community correction often happens when comments are unfairly downvoted—but it takes a little while.

Thanks for the clarification on policy. At the least, I now know that self-deleting a comment that is in the wrong does not stop downvotes/flags.

Hmm, that doesn't sound quite fair. I wonder what we could do better there.

I didn't see the comments that you erased, but based on many things you've posted in the past, I'm sure they were in good faith and driven by concern for the quality of HN, which is something we appreciate even in the rare case of a misfire.

It's a great tool, but I have one request: the slash line of the last tweet should ideally indicate how many total there were in the storm. For example, the friendly howto on your site should end with "6/6 Share and have fun. It's FREE!" This gives the individual tweet context when someone shares/quotes/screenshots it and it's being passed around: you know where the tweetstorm ends (instead of having to scroll down and look for a non-existent 7/ tweet).

Actually, since you're queuing up all the tweets to post them in one go, it should be feasible to add the out-of count to every tweet in the storm! That would be neat. But the last tweet should have it by convention.

I like the idea of the concluding tweet number wrapping things up. It's been noted.

Since characters are scarce in a tweet, we tried to reduce the number of non-critical text.

I think we can make the numbering type (x/y) an option.

Thanks!

Nice work!

You own storm-view looks broken https://writerack.com/crazyfoo/811331557608652800

"Twitter is stronger because w#oneteamneteam" != "Twitter is stronger because we are #oneteam"

Or is that my browser?

Hmm.. That seems to be a bug. Will be sorted.

I like the term storm-view. I'm stealing it. :D

I know I might sound like a vim user, but tweetstorms are honestly one of my favourite parts of twitter. Maybe there could be a better UI for authoring and displaying them, but there's something I really enjoy about reading a story 140 characters at a time.

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'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. :)

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.

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

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)

(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...

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

> 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.

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)

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...

What's wrong with reinventing TCP/IP over twitter? Sometimes they even appear out of order.

This is the company that leaked they were doing an algorithmic timeline, it was really unpopular and they said they weren't doing it, then it turned out to be a lie when they started rolling it out 2-3 weeks later.

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