Tweetbot has a cure for Twitter's 140-character limit woes
Sometimes, what you have to say just doesn't fit in 140 characters. For those occasions, Twitter users have resorted to several makeshift solutions: Some are marking their related tweets with numbers (1/7, 2/7, etc.), creating so-called tweetstorms, and others are simply replying to their own tweets, which has to be done manually in Twitter's official app.
Now, popular iOS/OS X Twitter client Tweetbot has a solution called Topics. Introduced in the 4.3 version of the app, Topics let you easily tweet a group of related tweets, automatically adding the same hashtags, if need be.
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It works as follows: When you tap on the Compose button on your iPad or iPhone, tap on the gear button and create a new Topic by tapping on the "+" button. Add a title and an optional hashtag and hit Create. Afterward, you'll see the name of your Topic above your tweet's content. Every subsequent tweet will then automatically be added to the same Topic, and will be added the same hashtag. When you want to resume your normal tweeting, tap the Close button on the left of the Topic's name in the Compose screen.
Tweetbot stores Topics in the cloud, so you can access the same topic on several different devices. Presently, these don't include the Mac, as Tweetbot for OS X still hasn't been updated with this feature.
Aside from the possibility of accidentally leaving a Topic on, the process definitely simplifies tweet storms and makes a nice little group of tweets. All the tweets in a Topic are highlighted in Tweetbots, but they also look good in the regular Twitter client and embeds (see below).
Unfortunately, there's no simple way to embed all the replies to a tweet on a website, so in this example you can only see the first two tweets. To see the entire Topic I created, go here.
The latest update makes Tweetbot, which is already one of the best third-party Twitter apps out there, even better, especially if you're a Twitter rant machine. The app is not free -- the iOS variant costs $9.99, and the OS X version will set you back the same amount.
The feature comes several months after Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey squashed the rumors that Twitter will be dropping the 140-character limit.
"It's a good constraint for us. It allows for of-the-moment brevity," he said in March.
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Topics Social Media X/Twitter
Stan is a Senior Editor at Mashable, where he has worked since 2007. He's got more battery-powered gadgets and band t-shirts than you. He writes about the next groundbreaking thing. Typically, this is a phone, a coin, or a car. His ultimate goal is to know something about everything.
