Enable Twitter Threaded Conversations - 3 Easy Steps
I love Twitter’s approach of providing the basic functionality and allowing third-party developers to create value-add applications through the use of the Twitter API.
One thing that’s sorely lacking, is the ability to follow conversation threads in Twitter. Some folks have tried to create applications to do that, but it’s hit and miss, because tweet matching must currently occur either on keywords, or time proximity, or both.
Twitter can open a new world of Twitter conversation threading by doing the following:
Step One — On each reply, record and store the tweet number of the original entry that’s being replied to.
When someone clicks the reply icon, record the original tweet number:
Step Two — Make the replied-to tweet number available on the record of a tweet in the API, as well as a list of tweet numbers that are replies to this tweet.
Step Three — Provide an API call to retrieve the details of a specific tweet.
These three simple steps will enable third-party developers to create awesome applications to show how threaded conversions occur and evolve within Twitter.
