In September, an Android developer sent screenshots of the feature to The Next Web’s Matt Navarra, who tweeted the photos of the hidden feature. The option appears to accommodate the popular tweet storm or tweet series by allowing users to create the individual tweets in-app. While the tweet series is a popular way of getting around the character limit that has since gone up to 280, currently users have to manually type their post into multiple numbered tweets or in replies to the original. In the screenshots of the hidden feature, the platform appears to allow users to create a series, then post them all at once.
WOAH! Twitter has a hidden tweet storm feature!
h/t Devesh Logendran pic.twitter.com/QpDLhKnAZZ
— Matt Navarra ️ (@MattNavarra) September 10, 2017
Social media platforms typically test a feature before a global rollout, and not all of those features make it through testing, which means it’s too early to say whether or not the tool will see a global rollout. With Twitter’s recent change to allow 280 characters, support for the longer format users have been creating manually for years wouldn’t be a surprising addition.
Twitter’s character limit is one of the social media network’s defining features, but it also limits the types of posts that can be shared on the platform. While that number was 140 characters since the launch of the platform, Twitter doubled that limit a few weeks ago. The longer posts come after Twitter changed the rules for what’s included in those numbers, with photos, GIFs, polls and quoted Tweets no longer applying toward that limit, and neither do usernames in replies.
While the character limit means that the social media platform isn’t ideal for crafting longer posts, it’s also what makes Twitter, Twitter. Just like Instagram has kept the “Insta” by not allowing users to schedule posts, the character limit, while twice the original, keeps the Twitter feed uniform and encourages brevity.
Update: Included Twitter’s confirmation of the testing.
