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!

Are @pmarca tweets real? I can not be the only one wondering if it is a bot, or at least a ghostwriter

— Danielle Morrill (@DanielleMorrill) January 1, 2014

@DanielleMorrill @cdixon Apparently my challenge is to pass the Turing Test myself :-).

— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) January 1, 2014

I got some positive feedback, and kept going:

@hnshah @DanielleMorrill that was quite good – wish more people would do this, just via tweets.

— Semil (@semil) January 2, 2014

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

Do I have to announce this is a tweetstorm or are you all used to it by now?

— Danielle Morrill (@DanielleMorrill) February 4, 2014

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

(This tweetstorm format inspired by @DanielleMorrill.)

— ZacharyCohn (@ZacharyCohn) February 10, 2014

Inspired by @DanielleMorrill #ifiwasaVC tweetstorm, i jotted down some thoughts on the role reversal: #ifiwereafounder

— Chip Hazard (@chazard) March 30, 2014

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.