The New Tweetbot Solves One of Twitter's Most Frustrating Problems

Much of Twitter's success, especially in the early years, can be attributed to high-quality and innovative third-party Twitter clients. Tweetie, TweetDeck, Twitterrific and Tweetbot are just a few that made Twitter what it is today. Twitter didn’t even have an official Twitter client for iOS until 2010 when it acquired Tweetie and renamed the app “Twitter for iPhone”.  

The newest version of Tweetbot solves one of Twitter's most frustrating problems, and I will not be surprised if Twitter eventually adds this functionality to the official Twitter apps. If they do, it will not be the first time. Twitter users have relied heavily on 3rd-party apps for advanced features, and over the years, Twitter has begun to implement the best of these features in the official apps. 

The Problem

Since Twitter enacted the 140 character limit, users have been coming up with ways to work around it. The two most common workarounds are tweeting screenshots of text and tweetstorming. 

Tweetstorming in particular is extremely combersome, but since Jack, the CEO of Twitter, made it clear in March that the 140 character limit is going to stay, tweetstorming will remain an important part of the social network. 

The Tweetbot Solution

Tweetbot 4.3 was released last week with a new feature that makes tweetstorming a breeze. The feature is called Topics. It takes a few clicks to set up a new topic, but once you do, live-tweeting an event or ranting about Donald Trump will be easier than ever.

This is how to use topics in Tweetbot 4.3:

To create a new tweet, tap the gear icon; select “Topics”; and tap the “+”.

Name your topic. You can add an optional hashtag that will be automatically added to every tweet in your topic.

Tweet away. Each new tweet will automatically be part of the topic. Tweetbot will take care of making each tweet a response to the one before it. Any topics created in Tweetbot will look exactly like a regular tweetstorm.

If you want to tweet something and not include it in your topic, you simply tap the “X”. If you’d like to begin tweeting in that topic again, you’ll find your list of topics under the gear icons and "topics".

You can buy the iOS version of Tweetbot in the App Store for $9.99.