The move comes just a month after Twitter rattled the twitterverse by doubling the limit for tweets in most languages to 280 characters, in a bid to draw in more users and boost engagement. It was the first time the character cap was raised since Twitter was founded.

“A few years ago we noticed people creatively stitching Tweets together to share more information or tell a longer story,” product manager Sasank Reddy said in a blog post.

“We saw this approach (which we call ‘threading’) as an innovative way to present a train of thought, made up of connected but individual elements.”

An “add another tweet” button is being added to the Twitter application, along with a “show this thread” label that can be clicked to see posts woven together by authors.

Threaded tweets will be published at the same time, but more posts can be added, according to Reddy.

“Launching tweetstorms/thread today,” Twitter co-founder and chief executive Jack Dorsey tweeted from the firm’s San Francisco headquarters.

Twitter posts about a topic, typically fired off in rapid succession by someone intent on writing more than allowed by the character limit, have been referred to as “tweetstorms.”

Many replies to Dorsey’s post called on Twitter to focus on dealing with extremists, trolls, and “bots” abusing the service instead of packaging tweets together.

“This will make some of the thoughtful longform posts on Twitter more accessible to a broader range of people. Good,” read a reply to Dorsey from a verified account of venture capitalist Chris Sacca, whose investments included Twitter.

“But not sure why it launched before you make more moves to reduce hate speech, ban Nazis, eliminate Russian trolls, and stop the spread of fake news.”

Threads will be rolled out in an update to Twitter in the coming weeks, according to Reddy.

For a large corporation with thousands of employees vested with them for decades, moving to the next level is truly a “big deal”. They need an engine that runs powerful and fast to uniformly drive all the constituent parts together toward a loftier goal. At Kaskikornbank (KBank), we have been preparing for this big step in our journey, and so established our KBank Digital Academy. We hoped it to would be a major force that drives everyone forward with a well-conceived, highly structured development roadmap and the strong intent to create a brighter future for KBank.

To become a world-class international institution |dedicated to our own digital transformation via human capital development, the KBank Digital Academy |co-designed several educational programmes with |expert partners to deliver modern content to help |leverage digital skills across our organisation.

Along our journey to the establishment of the KBank Digital Academy, we conducted several seminars to raise the digital awareness of KBank employees and enjoyed a high rate of participation at every session. We started with data analytics, which is an important key to corporate success because it gleans the “next best action” for business operations. The session resonated well with our employees. We noticed a highly vibrant mood among attendees starting with our very first session. It was a |perception that KBank was evolving into a more modern organisation with a promising future that seems more tangible than ever.

On a global scale, it has been proven that major changes must start at the top. Luckily, our KBank executive leadership has always supported this journey of transformation and so our second academy session featured KBank |president, Kattiya Indaravijaya, sharing how global |businesses like Facebook, Amazon, and Netflix work in a rapid changing environment using “design thinking” |concepts. She had attended a programme at the Stanford d. School (a hub for thinking on human-centred design) with top executives from around the world and shared her thoughts from that experience with all staff. Her narrative demonstrated that we really could move our bank; this is the core concept of our agenda.

The KBank Digital Academy on November 14 conducted an official kick-off event introducing our vision and opportunity to make a good impact on our organisation. We invited 10 “digital influencers” in Thailand to demonstrate how such an impact is created; they really impressed us. As said before, KBank Digital Academy is intended to pave the way for our staff to reach new |goals in digital banking. In order to run smoothly, we |categorised staff attendees into three target group levels and devised programmes of varying intensity and scope for each level.

At the first level, “Live” Digital, the target group is made up of all of our staff since they are regularly faced with changes to the way they work as well as their workplace settings. Basic digital capabilities need to be nurtured and become integral to their lives. Development coursework is provided to this group as public seminars and online courses that can reach all the participants.

At the second level, “Execute” Digital, the target group is those who will spearhead work through the KBank Digital Transformation team, as well as help staff working with digital products and services. Since they need to work in a really fast-paced environment, and they mostly learn on the job from their colleagues, KBank Digital Academy needs to assist them with complex skills specific to their tasks. Thus, the development tools we use with those working in such agile environments are on-demand courses accessed online and workshops with hands-on learning.

And at the highest group category, “Lead” Digital, attendees are workplace leaders and digital change agents. It’s undeniable that successful changes, as we can see from past examples, required strong visionary leadership. Therefore, we designed the Digital Leadership Program with content related to change management, decision-making using data and agile workplace |methodologies.

With this initial step, we expect to see the readiness of KBank staff greatly improved, along with a strong desire to learn. Our success would verify our choice of running KBank using “learning organisation” concepts. We have not only impacted our organisation internally, but also externally via the way the younger generation perceives us now.

In the process, we have revived our branding to now be seen as an employer of choice, a modern organisation that really cares about human capital development wherein everyone has a chance to learn and develop themselves, thereby learning to work more efficiently |in future workplaces.

Krit Jitjang is senior executive vice president, Kasikornbank.

Virtual reality or VR is becoming a vital technology for journalism and it is one of the newest trends in media.

“Through the perception of sight, sound, even smell, VR will cut us off from the current environment to get us into a simulated image,” said Francesca Panetta, VR editor of British newspaper The Guardian.

Panetta said that virtual reality journalism is in its infancy of developing a shared language. It will need to give audiences confidence in what they are offered as journalism, and it will need to maintain trust.

Experiencing a piece of VR journalism requires the “reader” to put a viewer over their eyes and listen through headphones. The more sealed off from other sights and sounds they are, the better the experience.

For this purpose, 87,000 Google Cardboard VR headsets with plastic lenses and a space to insert a mobile phone have been distributed in the UK. These are an affordable way to make accessible to many people.

Among The Guardian’s VR films, Panetta said, “The Party” propels the viewer into the world of an autistic teenage girl, and “Crime Scene” puts the user into the shoes of a trainee forensic officer trying to solve a murder. Panetta said that a range of experts on autism, and people with autism, were consulted for “The Party”.

The films can be viewed through The Guardian’s app, on Facebook and on YouTube.