Love ’em or hate ’em, but tweetstorms are still a thing. So there may as well be an app for that! A newly launched, exceedingly simple iOS application called Stormy lets you compose your thoughts as a series of tweets in advance of your Twitter spamming tweetstorming efforts, allowing you the time to craft just the right phrases and figure out any issues with character count ahead of posting.
The app also lets you choose a numbering style for your posts, and lets you schedule how many seconds should pass in between each tweet.
Tweetstorms, in case you’ve been offline most of 2014, are a popular and somewhat annoying trend on Twitter among the tech and media crowd where longform thoughts are posted as a series of numbered tweets instead of to, say, a blog post, where they might make more sense. (And where they’d certainly be easier to read!)
Netscape co-founder and investor Marc Andreessen really kicked off the whole tweetstorming thing, and has now posted some 321 tweetstorms according to online tweetstorm creator and tracker Tweetstorm.io. Others soon followed in his footsteps, and, among this niche crowd, tweetstorms really started to take off.
The format appeals to the way Twitter and mobile users tend to consume information today – in small, bite-sized chunks as opposed to longer articles. However, many opponents feel that tweetstorms unnecessarily clutter up Twitter timelines and the information is hard to follow, especially as replies stream in.
Today, there are other tweetstorm creation tools out there, including Tweetstorm.io and Little Pork Chop, a tweetstorm composer built by RSS developer Dave Winer. There’s even another mobile app for tweetstorming called Thunderstorm, but Stormy’s creator Daniel McCarthy says he didn’t care for the interface and ran into some glitches, which is why he decided to just build his own app instead.
Stormy is really just a side project for him, not a startup, he also clarifies. McCarthy is currently busy with anonymous social app Cloaq and a soon-to-launch suite of iOS games where the games’ ad revenue is donated to charity. (More on that later).
However, he’s continuing to develop the app’s feature set to include things like support for logging and categorizing past “storms,” support for adding photos, loading others’ replies, replying in the app, saving and scheduling posts for later, and more. McCarthy adds that he’s also trying to explore more of the Twitter API to see if he can monitor the service to detect tweetstorms to allow the app to include a discovery aspect as well.
In the meantime, the Stormy app, for better or for worse, is a free download here on iTunes.