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Tweetstorms, Hashtags, and Why User-Invented “Features” Keep Me Long on Twitter

Full Disclosure: I bought Twitter stock in the company’s IPO and I will not be selling it anytime soon.

Each year around the holidays I head North to Washington State to hibernate for a few weeks with my parents at their house, reflect on what I’ve been doing with my life, read, gamble at the reservation casino, drink and snuggle by the fire. This past winter I decided, after a few glasses of wine, to drive my Twitter followers a little crazy. I had a lot of ideas I wanted to share, 140 characters weren’t enough to express what I wanted to say and I was too lazy to blog.

Soon, Marc Andreessen and I crossed paths (he had just gotten active on Twitter)… and he started tweetstorming too!


I got some positive feedback, and kept going:

There were questions of ettiquette for kicking off a new tweetstorm:

And some tweetstorms inspired response storms, which was really cool:

Other cool things happened, including talking to the Twitter team about their timelines feature (something you can only use through the API right now)…

And other things… mostly just new friendships started and great conversations…

It even resulted in an offer to turn one tweetstorm into a book (TBD)!

I am pretty sure I did *not* invent tweetstorming (it actually has a different meaning, primarily used by activists in the past to harass brands online) but the tweetstorm — much like the hashtag, which was created by my friend Chris — is why Twitter is awesome.

On Twitter, users figure out the features and the interface for their conversations.

One Comment

  • Tweetstorm.io

    Yes! I went ahead and made tweetstorm.io to provide a better way of making/creating tweetstorms. I made sure that it detects #hashtag based tweetstorms because of #ifiwasaVC

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