One of the most delightful occurrences on the internet is when someone writes a little script or web app or bot to solve one of your pet peeves. Not only does it scratch your not-very-important-but-still-irritating itch, but it makes it seem like you’re not alone. “See?!? Someone else found this irritating!”
Darius Kazemi‘s Spooler is just such a service, which solves a simple, recently emergent problem: sharing sequences of interconnected tweets. How do you share Twitter threads (or, god help us all, “Tweetstorms”) with people who don’t follow the same folks, or who are just sensible people who don’t want to recreate long sequences of posts hours after the fact? And how do you do so without the awful tweet that just says “Thread”? (If you are a normal person and don’t use Twitter, this NPR article from April lays out the context pretty well.)
If you wanted to share a Twitter thread with someone who isn’t on Twitter, or who wasn’t online when the thread started, you could certainly use Storify or one of its alternatives.
Kazemi’s Spooler offers an elegant solution to this problem: It takes a Twitter thread and turns it into a blog post, complete with a URL you can then share. (Or, for maximum irony I guess, tweet!). To use it, you go to the Spooler web page, and log in with your Twitter credentials. (This is safe, because it doesn’t expose your password to Spooler, or give Spooler permission to post. And you can always revoke its credentials by going to this page.)
Once you’ve logged in to Spooler, you just paste the URL for the last tweet in the thread. Spooler churns back through the thread, and gives you a page with all the different tweets “spooled” into a blog post. That post includes pictures, animated gifs, and any other media linked in the original thread. It’s very convenient! It also includes a big link with attribution to the person who originally posted the tweets, so that anyone you share the link with will know where it came from. Here, for example, is a very funny story by Ashley C. Fordabout her experiences as an elementary student with antidrug education programs. (Um, very mild language warning, I guess.) Here’s what it looks like:
The one drawback of the tool–which is, after all, in beta, is that the person you share the link with also has to log in with Twitter. It is a neat trick, though, and is certainly something worth experimenting with!
