3ad.at introduces comment threads for Twitter
August 6th, 20093ad.at introduces (kind of) comment threads for Twitter
- 3ad.at is like Twitpic but for discussion threads
Twitter continues its tremendeous growth month after month. Twitter’s website attracted a total of 44.5 million unique visitors worldwide in June, 2009, according to comScore. Despite the popularity of the microblogging site, it is often criticised for lack of basic functionality.
One example of such basic functionality which Twitter has yet to implement, is the ability to comment on a tweet, such as a question from a fellow Twitter user, in a form which looks like a discussion thread. Discussion threads are easy to follow, even when multiple people are commenting, and don’t require the user to skip back and forth between Twitter profiles to puzzle the conversation together.
Most of Twitters’ competitors already have this functionality. Thanks to Twitters’ open API, starting from today there is a simple solution for Twitter users who want to easily integrate threaded forum-like discussions into their daily Twitter lives.
3ad.at gives the Twitter user the ability to start a forum-like discussion thread tightly intertwined with Twitter. The service is similiar to Twitpic or yfrog, but instead of hosting images, it hosts discussion threads between Twitter users. The user just visits http://3ad.at and enters the starting tweet of the thread, authenticates using their Twitter account, and the tweet is spread to all of the user’s followers.
The followers can then visit the thread’s URL and read the whole thread, and reply to certain tweets in the thread as well as the thread as a whole.
One disadvantage with 3ad.at is that you have to visit the thread itself to reply to a tweet in it, but 3ad.at’s founder Micael Widell assures that this will be not be necessary in the next version.
“Due to restrictions in Twitters’ search API, we haven’t yet implemented support for real time collection of answers to tweets in a thread. We are working on a solution for this, which will collect all replies to tweets into the thread itself” says Micael Widell, creator of 3ad.at.
Micael Widell is a tech entrepreneur based in Stockholm, Sweden. He is involved in multiple tech startups, of which 3ad.at is the latest to be released. Previously he has worked for IBM and Ericsson, as well as his web design firm Xeniac Design, which he founded in 1999.
