New Twitter Now Showing Full Conversations In The Side Pane

A couple days ago, we noted that Twitter was back on the new feature charge with the new People area they’re testing out. Well, make it two-for-two, as yesterday they rolled out another new feature — one that many users have been asking for since New Twitter was unveiled: full conversation threads.

Yes, if you click on a tweet with the chat bubble icon, you’ll see the detail of what that tweet was responding to in the right pane of New Twitter. Previously, you could only see one level deep into the conversation. But now, Twitter will show you an entire back and forth (assuming the users responded using the “reply” button each time). And depending on where you hop in to the conversation, you’ll see all the “in reply to” message above, the tweet you clicked on in the middle, and the “replies” below in this pane.

This is a much easier way to follow conversations on Twitter, and it’s something that the standalone Twitter Search product has had for some time. Several third-party clients offer this functionality as well (as do Twitter’s mobile apps). But this is yet another reason not to leave twitter.com.

Back in June, we noted that Twitter had hired the creator of the app Twitoaster, which was interesting since that app specialized in surfacing conversations on Twitter. No word on if that played a roll in this roll-out. I’m just glad it’s here.