(This is an aside.)

I have been using a convention on Twitter for the past few months, a bit of microsyntax, and I guess I should spell out my intent.

When I am writing a tweet that is principally focused on me, as a person, I enclose the tweets in parentheses, like this:

(moves desk to standing orientation)

February 8, 2013

This is intended as information of a personal-but-not-private nature, the sort of thing that might be interesting for those following me as an individual, as opposed to me as a public figure. And yes, I am a public figure, and you are too. 

My point in this post isn’t a rehash of the privacy/publicy argumentarium, but just a mild advocacy for the use of the parens for these asides. And the hope that Twitter clients in the near future would allow people to dial in/out the asides intended for the inner circle.

Behind this is the groupings concept: you don’t have to be invited to be a member of my inner circle. It’s not — and really shouldn’t be — controlled by me. It’s a decision that others make: how much does this other person matter to you? If you like someone enough to know when they raise or lower their standup/sitdown desk, or what the weather is from their window, or what kind of sandwich they ordered today, then tune in to their asides. 

And those who want to filter out that stuff: please do. I am creating enough social exhaust without it, I am sure.

So: please start using asides, and maybe we can get Twitter clients — maybe even Twitter — to support them, just like they did @mentions, retweets, and #hashtags.

8 February 2013 14 Permalink

Twitter Reclaims ‘Cashtags’, formerly called ‘Tickers’

No one should be surprised that Twitter has decided to colonize the microsyntactic space that stock tickers ($AAPL) have been playing on Twitter. Howard Lindzon may be expressing displeasure since it steps on the toes of Stocktwits, but it shouldn’t be surprising.

Twitter has at long last tried to make some money out of hashtags, which they basically ignored for years. And they reworked retweets to simplify their internal architectural problems. And of course, long before that, they decided that the @mention was a good thing, and pulled in down into the infrastructure.

Every exploitable bit of microsyntax we, the users, dream up they will take and run with. More power to them.

Here’s a few from the microsyntax archive that I’d like them to start using:

Place tags —

@stoweboyd: I just landed in /Montreal/ and I am looking forward to some smoked meat

@stoweboyd: Standing outside /St Paul Hotel, Montreal/ waiting for friends headed to dinner

@stoweboyd: In October, I’m speaking in /Amsterdam/ and /Brighton UK/

— intended to structure the discussion about locale, especially helpful in the last example because GPS or other location sensing doesn’t help.

If Twitter’s becoming a media company, they could route appropriate tweets or other ads/offerings my way in all three of the cases above.

Or ‘twhich’ tags, or twiches, where people can ask questions, or poll people, as @f does here with his friends @a @b and @c:

Hey @a @b @c chinese food at 7? yes[] no[] maybe[]

to which the recipients could respond

@a: Hey @f @b @c chinese food at 7? yes[x]

@b: Hey @f chinese food at 7? maybe[perhaps 8pm?]

Or a twhich could be more time oriented or choice oriented

@a: Chinese food tonight? @b @c 7pm[] 8pm[] joes[] wongs[]

with these kind of answers:

@b: Chinese food tonight? 8pm[x] joes[1st] wongs[2nd]

@c: I’ll eat anywhere: Chinese food tonight? 7pm[x] 8pm[x]

Or more open-ended questions thrown out to your followers:

@stoweboyd: How do you like the idea of twhiches? cool[] dumb[] I’d never do it[]

And all sorts of support could be provided by appropriately aggregating the thread of the discussion with a summary, like how many responded, are coming, alternative suggestions, etc.

Obviously, there are media and recommendation options available in twhiches and place tags. So we should just expect that if services started to support them — the way that Stocktwits supports cashtags — then sooner or later twitter will come rolling in too.

And I have a few other bit of microsyntax they could make money from… like geomessages:

@stoweboyd: Dear @/Amsterdam/ I’m speaking there in Oct at @rtecheurope and looking forward to it!

Perhaps to send a message to all my current followers that are based in Amsterdam, or a sponsored message to non-followers in Amsterdam? (In the latter case, I would have to have a credit card on file, they’d have to send me a direct message with the price, etc.)

So, if the folks at Twitter want to use these ideas, fine. I willing to talk, too.

Update: 4:12pm — Jamie Holzhuter offers this:

@holzhuter: @stoweboyd /location/ microsyntax? yes[x] (yes, please)

31 July 2012 8 Permalink

Twitter Activity Streams: Surfacing Social Gestures Like Tumblr

Twitter is preparing to roll out a fairly significant rethinking of the user experience for the microstreaming service. They are planning to bring the social gestures that users make out in the open. These gestures are the actions of following people, favoriting tweets, retweets, or adding people to lists. Some of that gestural information has been available in Twitter to date, but most of it hasn’t been found in the stream along with the tweets themselves.

The change will come by changing the ‘@mentions’ tab into two:

MG Siegler, Twitter Comes Alive With Realtime Activity Streams

Specifically, the “@Mentions” tab on twitter.com is being replaced by two new tabs: “@USERNAME” and “Activity”. These two streams will add an additional layer to Twitter and to Tweets themselves, a layer showing the social activity around them.

The @USERNAME (obviously, USERNAME will be replaced by your Twitter name) stream will still show your @replies, but it will also show things like when someone follows you, when someone favorites one of your Tweets, when someone retweets one of your Tweets, or when someone adds you to a list.

The Activity stream will show you all of those things, but related to all of the people you follow on Twitter. In other words, you can see if a connection has retweeted a Tweet, or if they followed someone new, etc.

Siegler doesn’t say that the current Timeline tab — which shows the tweets from you and all that you follow — will remain unchanged, but that is my interpretation at present.

Surfacing social gestures in general — and making favoriting a social preoccupation instead of a not very robust bookmarking tool — is a great way to make Twitter a richer social experience. In fact, this shift feels like Twitter has taken a long hard look at Tumblr, and has decided to capitalize on that social networked blogging platform’s success, which is driven to a great extent by the richness of social gestures, which are presented in stream. Here’s a snippet of my Tumblr stream, showing gestures and a post:

I wrote a piece not too long ago, What Twitter Could Learn From Tumblr, which focused on the efforts that Tumblr has recently put into its support of tags, and curation of tagged topics. (For those still not familiar with Tumblr, you might read Comparing Tumblr To Wordpress.)

But it seems like the social gestures of Tumblr — which are natively presented in the Tumblr stream — will be the first innovation to jump from Tumblr to Twitter.

I wonder if Twitter will take the ‘notes’ idea from Tumblr, as well? In Tumblr, all the social gestures associated with a post can be displayed on that post’s page (depending on the template settings). So If I post something that garners a great deal of interest — getting liked and reposted a great deal — there is a long series of gestures shown on that page. In a sense, the post has it’s own associated stream: all the gestures that it caused.

On Twitter this would mean that the page associated with a tweet — the one reached by clicking on the tweet’s timestamp — might show all the favorites and retweets tied to the tweet. Will have to see if this will be done.

And oh, there is still all that work to be done on tags, which Twitter still doesn’t seem to be very interested in, yet.

Source: TechCrunch

11 August 2011 86 Permalink

What Twitter Could Learn From Tumblr

Twitter is on a fast growth path, as shown by recent data, but then the same data show Tumblr growing even faster.

What’s the story?

Ultimately, everything important will appear in the streams first — like the stream of URLs in Twitter, and the stream of reblogs and likes in Tumblr — and those companies that own the streams will be in the best position to provide the complete liquid media user experience to users.Twitter and Tumblr strongly diverge in their treatment of tags. Tumblr has implemented tags as first class metadata, explicitly supported by the Tumblr system, while Twitter continues to treat tags as microsyntax: text conventions invented by users, embedded in the messages. And I think this is a mistake for Twitter, and for the community.

You might counter my claim by saying, “Hey, wait! I use hashtags all the time, and so do others! Twitter supports their use!” But you’d be wrong. Twitter treats hashtags as text, just like all the other characters in a tweet. So if you write a tweet like this —

@JohnFontana: @DeepakChopra channeling his inner @stoweboyd #140conf

— and the ‘#140conf’ text represents that the tweet pertains to the 140 Character Conference (where I spoke yesterday, and so did Deepak Chopra). The important thing to realize is that Twitter does nothing special with the hashtag: it merely retrieves tweets that have that text in them during searches. Period.

Contrast that with the convention of the at sign (‘@stoweboyd’ ‘@deepakchopra’) that originally arose from users indicating who a tweet was intended for, but which Twitter adopted and built into the system at a deep level. Ditto for retweets, which was originally ‘RT’ text, and now is now implemented operationally, as a kind of message. Not so with tags.

Tumblr, on the other hand, like most blogging tools, has rich and deep support for tags. In the editor, the user can add tags to posts:

And knowledgeable users can take advantage of the tags, for example, typing in the URL to access posts with a certain tag, like ‘www.stoweboyd.com/tagged/curation’, which leads to Tumblr creating a tag page (or pages) with all the posts with the tag.

Perhaps even more interesting is the recent push by Tumblr to integrate tags with curation in the relatively new Explore capability. Basically, Tumblr has decided that a list of a few dozen very popular and broad categories — like ‘Tech’, ‘LOL’, ‘Comics’, and ‘Fashion’ — should be curated by a mix of algorithm and editorial oversight. Like a media company might do.

Below, you can see the Explore page for Tech, with the Featured tab selected. This is the view that is curated by a group of Editors, selected by Tumblr’s staff, and provided a different version of the Tumblr dashboard (something I have yet to see, either directly on in a write-up).

You can see that I am featured as a Top Contributor this morning, along with Smarter Planet and a bunch of other folks.

Note that I carefully called the Tech page on Explore a category, and not a tag, per se. I think that what Tumblr has done is create a mapping from a long long list of tags, like ‘apple’ ‘pc’ ‘iphone’ and ‘twitter’, and mapped that to the Tech category. That means I don’t have to explicitly tag my posts as ‘tech’ to be included.

And tags can be pulled from across the entire Twitter universe, using URLs like ‘www.tumblr.com/tagged/paris’ or ‘www.tumblr.com/tagged/liquid_media’. These are examples of tags that have not been promoted to curated categories, like ‘Tech’ or ‘Fashion’, but in the future, Tumblr could always expand the roster of curated categories.

So, Twitter could learn from this in the following ways:

1. Tumblr tags are metadata, and could be built-in more natively into the Twitter experience. For example, just as Twitter is now analyzing URLs and shortening them in the various clients, a similar analysis and indexing could go on for hashtags, either at the point of posting or at the point that a tweet from an external client enters the Twitter API.
2. The API could be extended so that tweets could be explicitly associated with tags, and these could be used to form queries, as well, like fetching the list of all the tweets I have made tagged ‘#140char’ or ‘#paris’.
3. Tag streams could be configured in a way similar to Tumblr Explore categories, and these could be either totally automatic — like the ‘All’ tab in Tumblr — or could be curated. Twitter could play the same role in curation as Tumblr is: picking editors and allowing the editors to identify top contributors.

Point 3 — where Twitter builds and manages its own liquid curation system, right in the Twitter application, as another set of Twitter owned-and-operated streams — is an enormous opportunity for Twitter, and one that would drive a stake in the heart of a dozen start-ups that are trying to make a business around topical influence on Twitter, like Klout, or media businesses, like Flipboard, Xydo, and News.me. But Twitter has not showed any reluctance in clobbering the ecosystem of quasi-parasitic companies living lamprey-like on the Twitter underbelly.

And, if coupled with a few other flourishes — like Flipboardish social journal display based on the URLs in the stream — Twitter could also destabilize the tablet media market pretty dramatically, and increase the company’s valuation dramatically.

By exploiting tags and their role in curation, and quietly repositioning the company as a media player, Tumblr is a giant step ahead of Twitter.Ultimately, everything important will appear in the streams first — like the stream of URLs in Twitter, and the stream of reblogs and likes in Tumblr — and those companies that own the streams will be in the best position to provide the complete liquid media user experience to users.

By exploiting tags and their role in curation, and quietly repositioning the company as a media player, Tumblr is a giant step ahead of Twitter.

[Update: 17 June 3:41pm EST — I have been informed by a commenter that hashtags are parsed by Twitter, and any hashtags embedded in the text of a tweet are accessible. But my real point stands: Twitter doesn’t develop that into a rich user experience. And the other ways that hashtags could be used in the API — like given a hashtag, show me all the tweets using it — would have to be implemented by an external program.]

17 June 2011 211 Permalink

Bang: A Microsyntax for Emergency Messaging

I have proposed a microsyntax for sending and receiving structured Twitter messages during and relating to disasters. See the emergency+codes tag for all discussion.

Why Not Hashtags?

One of the problems with microsyntax based on hashtags is that hashtags are words in specific languages, so there is an immediate divergence in this case with English and French, and perhaps Creole, as well?

This is countered by the creation of a second glossary of hashtags in French, but the equivalence is not immediately obvious.

The second problem is that people aren’t using the templates as defined. For example, “#name American & UF Alumni Lee Strickland is stuck there alive’ does have a name in it, but it’s buried. To use a simple metric, a stupid program wouldn’t be able to extract ‘Lee Strickland’ from that.

I think that a few other approaches could work better even given the requirements that a disaster imposes:

• People will have only the most primitive communication capabilities, like cell phones, or public computers. (We have to imagine these at least, or Twitter and microsyntax can’t play a role at all.)

• We have to rely on Twitter as the basic platform, although it is possible to imagine external applications that are designed to work with Twitter, so long as they don’t require specialized software or hardware on the communication device. This means that specialized applications can be developed that interoperate with Twitter. As just one example, geolocational elements could be used to display messages relative to locations in a stricken area, like Haiti in this case.

• Hashtags are a general purpose tool, like a hammer, but even the best hammer can’t be used for all purposes. A hammer is a bad wrench, for example. In general, hashtags are intended to represent themes or topics that a post is about. Extending them to act as keywords is attractive at the moment, because various search tools currently identify the ‘#abc’ structure. But using hashtags consumes too many characters unnecessarily in a 104 character contex.

The Bang Microsyntax

My recommendations at this point for Disaster microsyntax are these:

1. We should dedicate ‘!’ to indicate that a message is associated with a specific named disaster or emergency. This use of ‘bang’ or ‘exclamation mark’ should take precedence over other possible uses of the character. I propose we call this system ‘Bang’. Some international organization — perhaps the UN? Red Cross? — should be responsible for the naming of the disaster. This should be the first element of the post. For example, ‘!Katrina’ would have appeared at the head of all emergency tweets related to Katrina. Note that this is in distinction to the use of #katrina in a post, which does not indicate that it is an emergency post, just someone commenting on Katrina, for example in regard to local Lousiana politics.

1. Twitter and related applications, like Twitter cllients, should be extended to support the use of bang in obvious ways. Note that this possibly means that Twitter could give preference to the passing of emergency messages, if necessary.

1. Geolocation is more general than emergency, and some general convention should be used for that. I have advocated the so-called ‘geoslash’ notation, but this is a critical part of the whole picture.

1. The syntax of emergency messages should be structured enough so that all parts of the message are defined elements, but loose enough that order of the various elements is arbitrary.

1. A collection of two and three character codes based on bang should be developed to indicate various sorts of information useful in emergencies. For example, ‘!@’ could stand for the name of a person, based on the use of ‘@’ in Twitter and other applications. ‘!@@’ could be used for organizations, businesses, and so on. ‘!?’ could represent a question being asked, and ‘!!’ could be used for things desired, needed or the like.

1. A general model for adding a note or status to any defined element could rely on ‘:’. For example, ‘!@john jones: alive’ would indicate that John Jones is alive (in English).

Here’s an example, for a hypothetical disaster, a hurricane called ‘Bette’ that has hit the eastern seaboard of the US:

!bette !@john jones: alive /wellfleet hospital/

This is an emergency message stating that John Jones is alive and is located at Wellfleet Hospital. Alternatively, the hospital could have been identified as an emergency-related organization or business, with ‘!@@wellfleet hospital’ instead of being treated as a location.

!bette @carlabreck !?@sam ying: with you? 

This is directed to @carlabreck using her twitter ID, asking the status of Sam Ying, specifically whether he is with her.

!bette /usps, provincetown MA/ !!food blankets: 20 people stranded here !!medevac: 1 compound fracture

This indicates a request ‘!!’ for food and blankets for 20 people stranded at the post office in Provincetown, and a request for a medevac for someone with a compound fracture.

Note that this message could be jumbled in different ways — !bette !!medevac: 1 compound fracture /usps, provincetown MA/ !!food blankets: 20 people stranded here — and it would still have the same meaning.

!bette /usps, provincetown MA/ !@hassan haque: compound fracture of the lower right leg

This is an accompanying message to the previous, indicating the name of the person with the compound fracture.

!bette /home depot, hyannisport/: roof has blown off the main building and is blocking Main Street www.sto.ly/8797gd

This is an informational post, identifying a hazard so that authorities monitoring might do something.

Getting Into Circulation

I am open to working with other groups interested in implementing tools and techniques to circulate this microsyntax for emergency messaging, or something like it.

30 March 2010 1 Permalink

Hash Tags = Twitter Groupings

Chris Messina has outlined (in a fairly voluminous way) a proposal for the use of hash tags (strings like “#tag”) as a way to help make sense of the noise within Twitter. He enumerates different sorts of “groups” that could be supported in Twitter, and then takes my concept of ‘groupings’ — ad hoc assemblages of people sharing a common interest implied by a tag — and runs with it:

[from Groups for Twitter; or A Proposal for Twitter Tag Channels]

[…]

The type that I’m most interested in, and am prepared to offer a concrete proposal on, is actually of a fourth kind, most closely related to Stowe’s “groupings”, but with a slightly different lean, primarily in the model of how the grouping is established. In the cases presented above, there are very explicit approaches taken, since it’s somewhat taken for granted that groups imply a kind of management. Whether you’re dealing with public groups that you create, join and then promote or contact groups that you ultimately must manage like any kind of mailing list, they imply an order of magnitude of work that would ultimately work against the adoption of the whole grouping premise and thereby minimize any benefits to a select group of hyper-dedicated process-followers.

I’m more interested in simply having a better eavesdropping experience on Twitter.

I support the details of Chris’ spec. My sense is that tags in Twitter, as elsewhere, define shared experience of some kind, involving all those using the tag. And the use can be either actively putting a hash tag (like “#hashtag”) into a tweet, or more passively opting to follow a stream of tweets related to a tagged theme.

This accords exactly with the idea of groupings. I am increasingly uninterested in traditional groups in social apps: where members ‘join’, perhaps following a required invitation, and someone ‘owns’ and ‘manages’ the group. Groups have their place in the work context, but are less relevant in open socializing of individuals. Groupings can be wonderful for serendipity: consider the grouping of all people within Last.fm who have listened to a particular musician recently, or the clutch of people who have tagged a blog post with the term ‘Twitter’.

Just in passing: the failure of Technorati to make something out of the millions of groupings lost within their map of the blogosphere baffles me. I hope that some enterprising entrepreneurs begin to think about the meta-groupings that could be found across these various applications, across these apparently unrelated social media streams. A new angle for MyBlogLog, perhaps?

Tagspaces could be interesting and rich shared experiences, but no one seems to be really exploring that side of their existence. Del.icio.us has trained us to think of tags as metadata for bookmarks, and blogs have trained us to view them as metadata for posts. But tags imply communities, and no one is doing much to let those communities find themselves. Twitter hash tags could help.

[PS I looked, and the domain “www.twittosphere.com” is already taken, damn it.]

[original comments copied from Wayback Machine:

Hey Stowe, thanks for trudging through my post and inspiring large portions of it! I find that I blog so little these days, relying primarily on Twitter and Screenshots, that when I do, I often carry on with myself for days! (aside: I really need an editor!).

Anyway, I think you’re exactly right about tags. Before I wrote the post, I spent some time chatting with Thomas Vander Wal about his “come to me web” and his notion of tags. It’s identical to the one that you envisaged. I can say proudly that I finally “get it” about tags.

And you’re totally right about Technorati. If anyone could have, they had the chance to build the “come to me web” from the longtail. Instead, we have Facebook, a monolithic silo of data meted out in dollops and doses that they decide on, rather than in the rough-and-tumble, but close to humanity, way of the open web.

I think I’ve learned something here — and I think from now on, I’m going to advocate for the dissolution of hardened groups within social networks. For a long time I’ve felt that natural, organic decay is needed in these networks for them to work long term. Without death, there is no evolution. Thus, “groups” should be born the moment someone uses a tag and die the moment there’s a sustained silence in that tag’s life. What a fantastic model!

Oh, and love the new design!

Posted by: Chris Messina | August 26, 2007 at 10:42 AM

Thanks for the mention Stowe. MyBlogLog is already headed down the path you suggest with the use of groupings suggested by our users when they place tags on other members and sites.

Our search box on mybloglog.com now supports searching across the tags and adding them to the weighting and the initial results look promising for finding relevant sites that may have trouble breaking into the big search engine listings.

Check out searches for “aviation” or “hiking” for example.

Posted by: Ian Kennedy | August 26, 2007 at 10:58 AM

Hi Stowe,

Maybe you should try www.tweetosphere.com or www.tweettag.com for it relates to tweets nor twits. I still think you need a definition for these. Another option would be to use / create a tag and share it with your friends. The tag would have a unique number which may be public or private which could tie back to some definition. That way people could share the same tag for different meanings. Your twitterific or tweet-r would simply convert your #tag to the number or a tiny url to a wiki etc. Let me know what you think. 

Cheers

Posted by: stuart | August 26, 2007 at 01:03 PM

I agree that ad-hoc groupings are more interesting that explicit membership based groups. Using explicit tags may help within a Twitter stream, but I’m more in favor of implicit means to tag yourself and your experiences.

(The new design generally looks good, but the photo with your face chopped in half is disconcerting, but i’m not an artist…)

Posted by: Mike | August 28, 2007 at 10:57 PM

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26 August 2007 Permalink