Some Thoughts on Twitter as a Micro-Blogging Tool

Planning a threaded Tweetstorm? Here’s the rules: 1/Tweet 2/Reply to 1st Tweet but remove your @name 3/Reply to 2nd Tweet not 1st 4/Repeat

— Mark Suster (@msuster) May 29, 2015

I learned the hard way by doing a Tweetstorm below but linked every subsequent Tweet back to the original Tweet to create the thread. I faced the wrath of the community. It turns out that it works fine how I did it with the web version of Twitter but not with mobile.

1/ Twitter started off positioned as a micro-blogging platform but in the end became more of an RSS reader

— Mark Suster (@msuster) May 29, 2015

2/ @pmarca popularized the “Tweetstorm” which ironically brought the real concept of microblogging to Twitter many years after its inception

— Mark Suster (@msuster) May 29, 2015

3/ What I love about Tweetstorms is that you get engagement on each 140 chars. It forces clarity of writing & discrete ideas

— Mark Suster (@msuster) May 29, 2015

4/ Each point you make in a Tweetstorm in a way has to be its own independent idea to be truly effective

— Mark Suster (@msuster) May 29, 2015

5/ Twitter doesn’t support Tweetstorms so the community developed the norm of responding to your own Tweetstorms to create a single thread

— Mark Suster (@msuster) May 29, 2015

6/ Of course it takes expertise to do a single-threaded Tweetstorm & even people like me had to learn it the hard way

— Mark Suster (@msuster) May 29, 2015

7/ The beauty and longevity of Twitter has always been the creativity of community: RT, MT, #, Tweetstorm, @names, OneShot

— Mark Suster (@msuster) May 29, 2015

8/ Twitter eventually takes best of organic uses & builds into product. Do with Tweetstorms & make it truly a microblogging platform!

— Mark Suster (@msuster) May 29, 2015

9/ I think Medium is closest tool to a microblogging platform since it comments on a single concept within a post vs. comment at end

— Mark Suster (@msuster) May 29, 2015

10/ Constraints of Twitter give product that is truly unique & innovative. Microblogging actually better on Twitter than any CMS due to this

— Mark Suster (@msuster) May 29, 2015

11/ After handling Tweetstorms I hope Twitter will next incorporate OneShot like features into the product. Needed Twitter functionality

— Mark Suster (@msuster) May 29, 2015

12/ Just doing a threaded Tweetstorm for me was really fucking hard to figure out in realtime. Unless built into product won’t get adoption

— Mark Suster (@msuster) May 29, 2015

PostScript

@peretti@pmarca@bhorowitz@kanyewest prolly cuz i don’t know my history :)

— Mark Suster (@msuster) May 29, 2015

Please feel free to leave comments old school style at the end of this post. I’d love to hear your views.