Someone Made a Tool That Turns Twitter Threads Into Blogs 1/87

Nearly all Twitter threads are insufferable. If you disagree, chances are you've subjected the world to an insufferable thread of your own, clogging up your follower's feeds with numbered, half-baked opinions sent into the ether 140 characters at a time. Or, you're the type of person who quotes a tweet with "THREAD!" which is almost worse.

But the rare Good thread does exist. Saving us all from scrolling through endless tweetstorms is Darius Kazemi's Spooler application. It's simple to use: Enter the URL of the last tweet of a thread, and watch the whole thing unfold as a blog post. (Kazemi explains the reasoning behind using the last tweet in a thread instead of the first, as well as most of his stylistic coding choices, on his blog.)

"I was inspired by the endless numbered anti-Trump threads posted by journalists and, um, 'citizen journalists,'" Kazemi told me, in a Twitter message. "Spooler is half actually-useful-tool, half me-being-annoyed-at-threads." Being annoyed at shit online truly is the mother of invention.

One of the best uses for Spooler is transforming threads with several actors/characters into a cohesive narrative, so you don't have to scroll through endless tweets and replies to trace back who's who. For example, I spooled friend-of-Motherboard Sarah Jeong's great live-tweeting thread about the monkey selfie case that made its way to the Ninth Circuit.

Jeong doesn't use sentence case or much punctuation in this thread, but it doesn't matter. Kazemi accounted for typical Twitter-speak style in the output, adding rules around line breaks and sentence-case style that make it readable. And the result is even funnier for the lack of structure and stream-of-consciousness writing. Spooler also includes GIFs and images inline, so I know exactly what the "ಠ_ಠ" she mentions looks like in context.

A recent update accommodates up to 600 tweets, meaning we're cursed with the entirety of threads like the now-infamous Game Theory rant, in full. God help us all.

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