Sneaky Bastard

Twitter maintains message threading, which can be used to follow the chain of replies backwards in time. Of course, your Twitter client application must specify the message to which it is a response (the in_reply_to_status_id parameter). The Twitter API also requires that the response include the original author’s @username in the reply text.

Nambu has a very elegant message threading display, but I disable that in favor of pure chronological order. Here’s a tip when trying to figure out what someone is replying to: Open the response message on twitter.com, then follow the “in reply to” links beneath the status update. Here’s a very short screen capture of this in action: