Thread Reader Automation

I often hear people complain that Twitter is total chaos. To be honest, I really enjoy using it daily as a source of technology discovery, but it didn’t really become effective and under control until I started to move people off my timeline and into curated “lists”.

For example, here’s a few:

• Portland — restaurant's, local news, things going on in the area
• Swoosh — work colleagues
• Friends — close friends
• Health — all aspects around health, physical fitness, health devices, etc
• InfoSec — security twitter can be incredibly noisy (with both good and bad content), so I have moved it off to something to read when I want to, not when its in the timeline.
• MindChangers — people that really have great topics/posts that make you stop and research, etc.
• WorkFlow — apps and tools feed

My timeline is light, often focused, and is enjoyable to read.

One of the tools that I really enjoy using ThreadReaderApp — it’s premise is simple: “Transform Twitter Threads into a Readable Page”. Often people posts long content over a series of multiple tweets (which have a max length of 280 characters), and ThreadReaderApp pulls all of these into a single page that you can bookmark, or store as a PDF (with subscription).

Unfortunately, they don’t offer an iOS app at this time, but I’ve put together a useful Shortcut which you can “share” a twitter link with, and it will automatically unroll the multiple feeds and store it on your ThreadReaderApp account.

To recreate it, create a new shortcut as follows:

Once you have built the shortcut, you can then use the sharesheet to send over a URL to ThreadReader to add to unroll to your collection.

Enjoy!