Twitter itself doesn’t support adding tweets to collections on its iOS app – you’ll have to use Tweetdeck. Until today, Tweetbot had no way to display Twitter Collections, let alone create new ones. It gets better if you decide to publish a topic as a collection. It’s much simpler and faster than creating a tweetstorm by replying to yourself. You don’t have to manage any of it, and you’ll end up with a series of threaded tweets that’s really a string of messages in reply to each other. It even takes care of automatically stripping your username at the beginning of the tweet. Under the hood, Tweetbot will find existing tweets belonging to a topic, it’ll fetch the latest tweet from that group, and it’ll send the new tweet as a reply to it. You can just tweet by opening the compose screen and assigning a topic. Here’s how Tapbots turned a hacky workaround into an elegant option: you don’t have to actually reply to yourself, remove your username, or chain tweets every time. If you tap the ‘x’ button, you’ll remove the topic from the tweet and your message won’t be chained to anything you’ve previously tweeted. Tweetbot nicely indicates you’re tweeting in topic mode with a blue bar on top of the compose screen. Once you have some topics (they are stored on a per-account basis), you can pick one and it’ll be assigned to the tweet you’re composing. Alternatively, you can create and assign topics by tapping the gear icon in the Compose screen of a new tweet (where Drafts are also located). If you choose to mirror tweets from a topic into a collection, you can enter a description for the collection, too. The ‘Create Topic’ screen requires you to add a title (which only you can see) and it has two optional fields for hashtags and Collections. When you hit the Reply button on a tweet of yours, you’re shown a menu to send a reply or create a new topic. You can include hashtags with every tweet when a topic is assigned, and you can also automatically save a group of tweets as a Twitter Collection, which you can later share and publish elsewhere. They’re easier to create than normal tweetstorms and they are ideal for live tweeting as well as thoughts spanning multiple tweets. Topics in Tweetbot 4.3 use chained replies as the backbone for a cleaner presentation of multiple tweets about a subject. Under the hood, Tapbots is still leveraging the aforementioned workaround, but they’ve been clever enough to completely abstract that from the UI, building what is, quite possibly, one of the most ingenious Tweetbot features to date. Topics simplify the process of chaining tweets together with an intuitive interface that makes it look like Twitter rolled out support for topics. Tweetbot, the excellent Twitter client developed by Tapbots which relaunched with version 4.0 in October, is introducing an update today that fully embraces the concept of tweetstorms with a feature called “topics”. It’s not the most elegant solution, and it doesn’t work well for rapid fire live tweeting, but it sort of works and a lot of people use it by now. If you want to post multiple tweets in a row and establish a thread between them from start to finish, reply to your own tweet, removing your username at the beginning of the message, and you’ll “fake” a series of topical tweets which Twitter sees as part of a conversation…with yourself. Thus Twitter the community came up with the idea of the tweetstorm, a clever workaround based on how Twitter threads work. Sure, you could append the same hashtag to every tweet, “tagging it” for context, but that wouldn’t fix the underlying problem of a bunch of messages related to the same event and yet treated as atomic units with no relationship between them. The answer is that, so far, Twitter the company has mostly failed to provide users with ways to rapidly tweet commentary and have tweets intelligently grouped together once an event is over. You want to live tweet as the event unfolds. Picture this: it’s WWDC keynote day and you’re following the event.
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