Which, to me, is the disappointing thing about the new character limit: it does nothing to address this emerging usage pattern, one might even say emerging form of communication, of the tweetstorm.
It seems pretty clear that tweetstorms enable a certain mode of marshaling thoughts and communicating them in an off-the-cuff way that blogging services never identified or understood. And yet Twitter's product org doesn’t seem to understand it either.
That’s part of the missed opportunity I see: far from losing this ability, a proper tweetstorm feature should embrace it, making it easier to navigate and interact with.
On the contrary, it's harder to navigate because it is intermingled with all sorts of boxes, whitespace, tags, icons and hidden menus. Everything is hair-triggered by a touch making the whole page unstable. Tweetstorms fork into secondary threads that are hard to follow, unlike HN or reddit, and use 3 screens for content that fits on half a screen.
For some reason Twitter had decided to attempt to make their page behave like a UI rather than a forum or similar.
Thus we only get a single linear reading, and it wastes space by being presented as a floating "windows" above the main page.
Never mind that it is damn hard to see the full image, as no amount of clicking will actually make it fill the whole screen. Only bringing up the tweet "window" and then right clicking the image gets anywhere close.
At least they stopped requiring 100% of my processor to display them like when they first switched to the floating, easy to accidentally dismiss boxes.
That's, increasingly, apparently not understood by the average correspondent. Anything other than a continuous block of text preceding a quoted reply ("top posting") may cause confusion.
With the right client support (collapsed tweetstorms and stats), readers could delve as deeply into a topic as they were interested, and writers could see how far most readers cared to delve. That's seemed like a no-brainer development in Twitter for some time to me. Entire articles could be written and released in such a format.
This is the company that dreamed up lists, only to hide them behind multiple layers of UI rather than provide the ability to display them in columns front and center.
