Twitter has long been hamstrung by the limited number of characters afforded to its users. The 140 character limit was born out of necessity, but became both a blessing and a curse. Twitter recently increased its character limit to 280, and it's now making it easier to thread tweets.

Threads have always been possible on Twitter, with people replying to themselves with numbered tweets. These have come to be known as tweetstorms because they usually read as angry rants on a subject close to the person's heart. And now Twitter is making tweetstorms official.

Creating a Tweetstorm Is Now Easy

Twitter is making it easier to create a thread of tweets. You'll no longer have to build a thread one tweet at a time. Instead, you can create a whole set of tweets and post them all at the same time. The first few will appear in your timeline, and your followers can click to see them all.

All you need to do to create a thread a tweets (or tweetstorm) is compose a tweet as normal. Then click the "Plus" button in the bottom right-hand corner to add another tweet. Continue doing this until you have completed the whole thread, and then when you're ready click "Tweet all".

This means there's no longer a need to number your tweets, or waste characters informing people there are more to come. You can even add more tweets after the initial posting by clicking "Add another Tweet". And your followers will be able to spot a thread by the "Show this thread" label.

How About Letting Us Edit Tweets?

This is just the latest example of Twitter formalizing a feature invented by its users. The retweet, @reply, and hashtags were all created and popularized by Twitter users, and now the tweetstorm has joined their ranks. Now if only Twitter would let us edit tweets we'd all be happy.

Are you active on Twitter? Have you ever posted a series of tweets as a thread? And was it an angry, bile-filled tweetstorm? What do you think of Twitter's new threading feature? Will it change the very nature of Twitter? Please let us know in the comments below!

Image Credit: Giorgio Minguzzi via Flickr