People write tweetstorms because they’re “easier” than whatever their blog setup is. And the constraints of 280 characters at a time makes for both careful sentence construction and flow.
But - then you’ve got this lovely writing that is trapped on Twitter. At best, you come back and copy / paste the tweets back into a blog post.
The idea is a Micropub enabled tweetstorm builder. You log into it with your Twitter account and with Indieauth so that posts end up as one big blog post on your own site, but are sent to Twitter as a tweetstorm / collection.
User Impact
Who would want to use this and why?
Anyone that wants to compose tweetstorms in a richer environment while also having it post to their own site.
Features
PWA
Twitter login
Create a Twitter collection — I actually don’t know what all the features of collections are. Tweetbot supports this.
IndieAuth / Micropub support
Choose timing of tweets — all at once or pace them out by X minutes
Boris, I love this idea of this and how it could work.
If you haven’t come across it, ThreadReaderApp does something similar to this but in a reverse syndication instead of the method you’re describing. It allows one to publish a thread on Twitter and then use ThreadReaderApp to roll the thread up and post a copy of it to one’s website that supports Micropub. I’ve written a bit about how it works here: boffosocko.com/2020/05/28/threadreaderapp-micropub-to-blog/
I’d love to see something more like what you’re describing.
Another interesting option for this that has a lot of the functionality you’re looking for is Kevin Marks’ Noter Live. I know he’s considered adding Micropub functionality to it. I suspect he’d be very open to anyone who’d like to add that or other refinements via pull request to GitHub – kevinmarks/noterlive: A tool for indieweb live noting (aka live tweeting/live blogging). It does post live threads to twitter and currently gives the output as raw HTML that one could cut/paste into their site.
People write tweetstorms because they’re “easier” than whatever their blog setup is. And the constraints of 280 characters at a time makes for both careful sentence construction and flow.
But - then you’ve got this lovely writing that is trapped on Twitter. At best, you come back and copy / paste the tweets back into a blog post.
The idea is a Micropub enabled tweetstorm builder. You log into it with your Twitter account and with Indieauth so that posts end up as one big blog post on your own site, but are sent to Twitter as a tweetstorm / collection.
User Impact
Who would want to use this and why?
Anyone that wants to compose tweetstorms in a richer environment while also having it post to their own site.
Features
PWA
Twitter login
Create a Twitter collection — I actually don’t know what all the features of collections are. Tweetbot supports this.
IndieAuth / Micropub support
Choose timing of tweets — all at once or pace them out by X minutes
Boris, I love this idea of this and how it could work.
If you haven’t come across it, ThreadReaderApp does something similar to this but in a reverse syndication instead of the method you’re describing. It allows one to publish a thread on Twitter and then use ThreadReaderApp to roll the thread up and post a copy of it to one’s website that supports Micropub. I’ve written a bit about how it works here: https://boffosocko.com/2020/05/28/threadreaderapp-micropub-to-blog/
I’d love to see something more like what you’re describing.
Another interesting option for this that has a lot of the functionality you’re looking for is Kevin Marks’ http://www.noterlive.com/. I know he’s considered adding Micropub functionality to it. I suspect he’d be very open to anyone who’d like to add that or other refinements via pull request to https://github.com/kevinmarks/noterlive. It does post live threads to twitter and currently gives the output as raw HTML that one could cut/paste into their site.
Replied toa thread by Dave Winer and @chaodoze (Twitter)
WordPress should do a tool that goes the other way.
Let's you write a blog post in a series of tweets.
I know that probably seems counter-intuitive, but I learned today a fair number of users don't like the new block editor.
Twitter is, these days, a fairly fluid writing tool
Another interesting option is @KevinMarks’s noterlive.com which will compile your threaded tweets for cutting/pasting HTML to your site. Perhaps one day he’ll add Micropub functionality as well?
I've worked on webmentions, but implementing them on a static website is far than trivial :-( But check out https://t.co/DbkZbOCFrB It's may be what you're looking for.
Another option, though without Micropub (yet!), is Kevin Marks‘ NoterLive tool. It’ll let you create a thread and then (manually) copy over the rich data into your website pretty quickly. I love it especially for conferences.
I’ve been thinking about Twitter threads, tweetstorms and liveblogging for the better part of the week, and last night I had an idea that has stuck with me.
With the idea of Micropub allowing the ability to create updates, why couldn’t one build (or even modify) a Micropub client to create an interface to write relatively short updates with (date and timestamps to appear in the text) that, when published, concatenated that new piece of content into a longer piece of running text to send an updated Micropub request to an article or note on a site to allow that article to become an updating liveblog post?
I’m a bit shocked that no one has done it before now, and I suspect that one of the pre-existing micropub clients out there could probably add the functionality as a one day project at an upcoming IndieWebCamp.
I don’t suspect it was the sort of Micropub functionality that Kevin Marks was thinking about doing this weekend, but Noter Live comes pretty close to having a lot of this sort of UI already. Instead of just doing a single Micropub post at the end of a Twitter thread, why couldn’t it do an initial post at the beginning and then update the site with subsequent updates as it goes along while also acting as a means of syndicating the posts to Twitter and then returning those Twitter permalinks as syndication links on the user’s own site?
34.177024-118.1024256
Replied toa thread by Carter Rabasa and Boris Mann (Twitter)
Hmmm, struggling to find an easy way to embed an entire tweet storm on website/blog.
Am I missing something? Anyone got a pointer here?
This is nice, but I don't see any way to embed this on a website/blog.
I'm starting to think of Tweet storms/threads as a new form of "blogging", so I'm really interested in tools that pull that content into my own website/blog.
I had to briefly troubleshoot my self-hosted webmentions :), but check out all the tweets that got pulled in on this laptop article: https://t.co/99VYxYOyyG
I'm super glad I have that discussion in my own space!
This path will lead you down the route of #indieweb
If you want to give it a spin, I’ve always liked Noter Live as a live Tweeting tool at conferences. It automatically includes the hashtag, threads tweets, and saves speakers for easier/quicker writing/posting. When you’re done, it saves your history, so you can cut/paste and save/post it all to your own website (ie, it’s pro-DoOO!)
I really like Barnes’ intent to share. I just wonder if there is a means of owning these notes. Ideally, taking a POSSE approach, she might live blog and post this to Twitter. I vaguely remember Chris Aldrich sharing something about this recently, but the reference escapes me. This is also limited with her blog being located at WP.com. I therefore wondered about the option of pasting the content of the tweets into a blog as an archive.
Aaron, the process I use for taking longer streams of Tweets to own them (via PESOS) has Kevin Marks‘ excellent tool Noter Live at its core. Noter Live allows you to log in via Twitter and tweet(storm) from it directly. As its original intent was for live-tweeting at conferences and events, it has some useful built in tools for storing the names of multiple speakers (in advance, or even quickly on the fly) as well as auto-hashtagging your conversation. (I love it so much I took the time to write and contribute a user-manual.)
The best part is that it not only organically threads your tweets together into one continuing conversation, but it also gives you a modified output including the appropriate HTML and microformats classes so that you can cut and paste the entire thread and simply dump it into your favorite CMS and publish it as a standard blog post. (It also strips out the hashtags and repeated speaker references in a nice way.) With a small modification, you can also get your site to add hovercards to your post as well. I’ll also note in passing that it’s also been recently updated to support the longer 280 characters too.
Another shorter tweetstorm which also has u-syndication links for all of the individual tweets can be found at Indieweb and Education Tweetstorm. This one has the benefit of pulling in all the resultant conversations around my tweetstorm with backfeed from Brid.gy, though they’re not necessarily threaded properly in the comments the way I would ultimately like. As you mention in the last paragraph that having the links to the syndicated copies would be useful, I’ll note that I’ve already submitted it as an issue to Noter Live’s GitHub repo. In some sense, the entire Twitter thread is connected, so having the original tweet URL gives you most of the context, though it isn’t enough for all of the back feed by common methods (Webmentions+Brid.gy) presently.
I’ll also note that I’ve recently heard from a reputable source about a WordPress specific tool called Publishiza that may be useful in this way, but I’ve not had the chance to play with it yet myself.
Clearly, you can embed Tweets, often by adding the URL. However, there are more and more people deleting their Tweets and if you embed something that is deleted, this content is then lost. (Not sure where this leaves Storify etc.)
It’s interesting that you ask where this leaves Storify, because literally as I was reading your piece, I got a pop-up notification announcing that Storify was going to be shut down altogether!! (It sounds to me like you may have been unaware when you wrote your note. So Storify and those using it are in more dire circumstances than you had imagined.)
Storify announces it will disappear from the web on May 16, 2018. Once a core part of social-focused journalism projects like @acarvin‘s work, it’s larger archives and URLs will be gone. https://t.co/9KhEYCbX2e
It’s yet another reason in a very long list why one needs to have and own their own digital presence.
As for people deleting their tweets, I’ll note that by doing a full embed (instead of just using a URL) from Twitter to WordPress (or using Noter Live), that the original text is preserved so that even if the original is deleted, a full archival copy of the original still exists.
Also somewhat related in flavor for the mechanism you’re discussing, I also often use Hypothesis to comment on, highlight, and annotate on web pages for academic/research uses. To save these annotations, I’ll add hashtags to the annotations within Hypothesis and then use Kris Shaffer’s excellent Hypothesis Aggregator plugin to parse the data and pull it in the specific parts I want. Though here again, either Hypothesis as a service or the plugin itself may ultimately fail, so I will copy/paste the raw HTML from its output to post onto my site for future safekeeping. In some sense I’m using the plugin as a simple tool to make the transcription and data transport much easier/quicker.
I hope these tips make it easier for you and others to better collect your content and display it for later consumption and archival use.
Tweetstorms have been getting a horrific reputation lately. [1][2] But used properly, they can sometimes have an excellent and beneficial effect. In fact, recently I’ve seen some journalists using it for both marketing and on the spot analysis in their areas of expertise.[3]Even today Aram Zucker-Scharff, a journalism critic in his own tweetstorm [4], suggests that this UI form may have an interesting use case in relation to news outlets like CNN which make multiple changes to a news story which lives at one canonical (and often not quickly enough archived) URL, but which is unlikely to be visited multiple times:
Why not publish a sequence of small stories that connect together rather than one big one on the same URL that keeps changing?
Why not publish a sequence of small stories that connect together rather t
— Aram Zucker-Scharff (@Chronotope) February 10, 2017
A newsstorm-type user experience could better lay out the ebb and flow of a particular story over time and prevent the loss of data, context, and even timeframe that otherwise occurs on news websites that regularly update content on the same URL. (Though there are a few tools in the genre like Memento which could potentially be useful.)
It’s possible that tweetstorms could even be useful for world leaders who lack the focus to read full sentences formed into paragraphs, and possibly even multiple paragraphs that run long enough to comprise articles, research documents, or even books. I’m not holding my breath though.
Technical problems for tweetstorms
But the big problem with tweetstorms–even when they’re done well and without manthreading–is actually publishing them quickly, rapidly, and without letting any though process between one tweet and the next.
Noter Live–the solution!
Last week this problem just disappeared: I think Noter Live has just become the best-in-class tool for tweetstorms.
Noter Live was already the go-to tool for live tweeting at conferences, symposia, workshops, political debates, public fora, and even live cultural events like the Superbowl or the Academy Awards. But with a few simple tweaks Kevin Marks, the king of covering conferences live on Twitter, has just updated it in a way that allows one to strip off the name of the speaker so that an individual can type in their own stream of consciousness simply and easily.
But wait! It has an all-important added bonus feature in addition to the fact that it automatically creates the requisite linked string of tweets for easier continuous threaded reading on Twitter…
When you’re done with your screed, which you probably wrote in pseudo-article form anyway, you can cut it out of the Noter Live app, dump it into your blog (you remember?–that Twitter-like app you’ve got that lets you post things longer than 140 characters at a time?), and voila! The piece of writing that probably should have been a blog post anyway can easily be archived for future generations in a far more readable and useful format! And for those who’d prefer a fancier version, it can also automatically add additional markup, microformats, and even Hovercards!
Bonus tip, after you’ve saved the entire stream on your own site, why not tweet out the URL permalink to the post as the last in the series? It’ll probably be a nice tweak on the nose that those who just read through a string of 66 tweets over the span of 45 minutes were waiting for!
So the next time you’re at a conference or just in the mood to rant, remember Noter Live is waiting for you.
Aside: I really wonder how it is that Twitter hasn’t created the ability (UX/UI) to easily embed an entire tweetstorm in one click? It would be a great boon to online magazines and newspapers who more frequently cut and paste tweets from them to build articles around. Instead most sites just do an atrocious job of cutting and pasting dozens to hundreds of tweets in a long line to try to tell these stories.
While attending the upcoming conference Dodging the Memory Hole 2016: Saving Online News later this week, I’ll make an attempt to live Tweet as much as possible. (If you’re following me on Twitter on Thursday and Friday and find me too noisy, try using QuietTime.xyz to mute me on Twitter temporarily.) I’ll be using Kevin Marks‘ excellent Noter Live web app to both send out the tweets as well as to store and archive them here on this site thereafter (kind of like my own version of Storify.)
In getting ramped up to live Tweet it, it helps significantly to have a pre-existing list of attendees (and remote participants) talking about #DtMH2016 on Twitter, so I started creating a Twitter list by hand. I realized that it would be nice to have a little bot to catch others as the week progresses. Ever lazy, I turned to IFTTT.com to see if something already existed, and sure enough there’s a Twitter search with a trigger that will allow one to add people who mention a particular hashtag to a Twitter list automatically.
Feel free to follow or subscribe to the list as necessary. Hopefully this will make attending the conference more fruitful for those there live as well as remote.
Not on the list? Just tweet a (non-private) message with the conference hashtag: #DTMH2016 and you should be added to the list shortly.
Lazy like me? Click the bird to tweet: “I’m attending #DtMH2016 @rji | Dodging the Memory Hole 2016: Saving Online News http://ctt.ec/5RKt2+”
IFTTT Recipe for Creating Twitter Lists of Conference Attendees
For those interested in creating their own Twitter lists for future conferences (and honestly the hosts of all conferences should do this as they set up their conference hashtag and announce the conference), below is a link to the ifttt.com recipe I created for this, but which can be modified for use by others.
Naturally, it would also be nice if, as people registered for conferences, they were asked for their Twitter handles and websites so that the information could be used to create such online lists to help create longer lasting relationships both during the event and afterwards as well. (Naturally providing these details should be optional so that people who wish to maintain their privacy could do so.)