Twitter is known and loved for its simplicity but the site creators' reluctance to add new features does have its drawbacks. One functionality that could have a significant impact is threaded conversations, something that Twitter doesn't currently support, forcing users to resort to all sorts of workarounds to engage in something similar. A new site launched by well-known Delicious creator Joshua Schachter and called “a tiny thread” could be a solution to the problem.

A tiny thread is more like a proof of concept than a working service, with a spartan interface and no additional features apart from the core functionality. But what is there is actually quite interesting, creating exactly what it set out to do, namely a threaded Twitter conversation. Users can start a new thread on the site, and a tweet will be sent out notifying their followers of this. The actual messages only show up on a tiny thread and a default tweet is sent to Twitter saying “I joined a thread:” followed by the thread's name. This is done only for the users' first message in the thread so it doesn't get spammy.

It would be more interesting to have the actual messages show up on Twitter but this approach ensures that the conversations stay focused and don't derail from the topic or get too noisy. This was a common problem for other sites that attempted to create a similar service as retweets and other inherent issues quickly bogged down a popular thread. By keeping messages on a tiny thread the conversation can unfold more naturally but for now it isn't really a working solution. The site only lists recent subjects and there is no possibility to browse or search for past threads.

Seeing as this is just a small side project for Schachter, who now works for Google but has developed a tiny thread outside of his Google 20 percent time, it could have a real potential if it were to be launched as a full-blown service. Threaded conversations could be especially useful for Twitter now that FriendFeed, which offered a similar functionality through its comment system, has been acquired by Facebook.