If you’ve ever tried to follow a specific thread of a conversation through a massive series of replies on Twitter, you likely know how hard it can be to keep track. Conversations on Twitter seem to have been increasing in length lately, and the micro-blogging site recognized that something had to be done to fix the problem. In response, Twitter is rolling out a tweak to its Web interface that should make it easier to follow long conversations.
In fact, you may already have noticed it. While replies to a tweet used to show one at a time below the original tweet, specific groups of replies are now linked by a line, showing each as its own conversation. These chains should make it easier to follow two or three people talking to each other about another tweet, but it’s not the only tweak Twitter has made to how replies are presented.
The new view will also be “highlighting some of the most interesting exchanges surrounding a given Tweet right below that Tweet,” Twitter product manager Akarshan Kumar wrote in a post about the new feature on the Twitter blog. The post doesn’t specify every factor that is used to determine whether a conversation qualifies as “interesting,” but it did mention that whether the original account has replied is one factor.
It’s likely that this new method of showing conversations is already available to you, even if you haven’t noticed it yet. If you aren’t seeing it, it shouldn’t be long, as Twitter started rolling the feature out on Monday, and will continue to do so throughout the week.
For now, the new conversation threading is only available via Twitter’s website. Kumar notes in the blog post that the feature “will be rolling out to our mobile apps in the future,” but nothing more specific than that is currently known.
