With much inspiration from Jeff O'Hara, I have figured out a solution for establishing groups and community threads on twitter, a feature that the site has noticeably lacked for quite a while. You can follow the steps below to create your own twitter group on any topic.

1. Create a "dummy" twitter user that will broadcast the messages that are sent to the group on a single twitter feed.
2. Email me (alan at everythingdigital dot org), and let me know what the username and password for your "dummy" user are.
3. I will add your group to the script on my server.
4. Anyone who is a friend of the "dummy" user can use @username messages to post to the group (for example, with applegroup, friends of applegroup would post tweets such as "@applegroup How's everybody liking their iPhones?" and these messages would be added to the group discussion). New @username messages to the group take an average of one minute currently to be posted to the group discussion.