(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

‘Hashtag’ Is Selected As Word Of The Year By The American Dialect Society

I was involved in a twitter thread today with Ben Zimmer, who is a well-known lexicographer, and chair of the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society. He has been researching the Twitter hashtag, which was recently selected as Word Of The Year:

“Hashtag” is the 2012 Word of the Year American Dialect Society

In its 23rd annual words of the year vote, the American Dialect Society voted “hashtag” as the word of the year for 2012. Hashtag refers to the practice used on Twitter for marking topics or making commentary by means of a hash symbol (#) followed by a word or phrase.

Presiding at the Jan. 4 voting session were ADS Executive Secretary Allan Metcalf of MacMurray College, and Ben Zimmer, chair of the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society and executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com. Zimmer is also a language columnist for the Boston Globe.

“This was the year when the hashtag became a ubiquitous phenomenon in online talk,” Zimmer said. “In the Twittersphere and elsewhere, hashtags have created instant social trends, spreading bite-sized viral messages on topics ranging from politics to pop culture.”

Word of the Year is interpreted in its broader sense as “vocabulary item” — not just words but phrases. The words or phrases do not have to be brand-new, but they have to be newly prominent or notable in the past year. The vote is the longest-running such vote anywhere, the only one not tied to commercial interests, and the word-of-the-year event up to which all others lead. It is fully informed by the members’ expertise in the study of words, but it is far from a solemn occasion. Members in the 124-year-old organization include linguists, lexicographers, etymologists, grammarians, historians, researchers, writers, editors, students, and independent scholars. In conducting the vote, they act in fun and do not pretend to be officially inducting words into the English language. Instead they are highlighting that language change is normal, ongoing, and entertaining.

One interesting wrinkle is that Zimmer contends that I was the first to use the term ‘hashtag’ back in a post on 26 August 2007. My use was a response to Chris Messina’s proposal for so-called Twitter ‘channels’, which had the form of hashtags today (like ‘#hashtag’), but apparently I was the first to use the term hashtag to denote them. I also  coined the term ‘microsyntax’ to represent the developing use of symbols — like ‘@mentions’, ‘#hashtags’, ‘RT”, ‘$ticker’ — in Twitter and related apps. (I still haven’t been successful in getting ‘/geotags’ implemented.)

Wild. 

For @chrismessina @anildash @aral et al: Who first used the term “hashtag”/”hash tag”? @stoweboyd used it on 8/27/07: stoweboyd.com/post/972058051…

— Ben Zimmer (@bgzimmer) January 6, 2013

@bgzimmer @chrismessina @aral I think the usage “hashtag” predates Chris’ post, but @stoweboyd was first to apply that to twitter.

— Anil Dash (@anildash) January 7, 2013

I didn’t even have that post up on my blog. I moved my blog several times since 2007, from Typepad (where it was called /Message), to Squarespace, and then to Tumblr. And I hadn’t reposted all the older posts, since it has to be done manually. I reposted that piece today, copying the text from the Wayback Machine.

Source: americandialect.org

6 January 2013 18 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

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

Twitter’s New Retweet

My initial reaction to the announcement that  Twitter was going to implement the retweet (RT) microsyntax as a basic function of the platform was shock (see Project Retweet: When Ultrastructure Becomes Infrastructure). Retweets are created in a variety of ways — most importantly in a vague and imprecise way, with comments added — that I thought that nearly any attempt to pin the semantics of retweeting down would fail.

I am among the folks fooling with the new implementation of RT, and it works as advertised. Which means that I don’t think it adds much to the user experience. And it specifically does not allow me to add a comment to a tweet that I am retweeting, which is bad. Clicking the retweet never leads to a text experience with anything editable, so the richness of the RT experience is being drastically curtailed.

I guess there is some performance rationale for implementing RTs this way, since the initial tweet can’t be altered, and 100 retweets to the same initial tweet don’t create a hundred copies, but just a hundred pointers. This may be an implementation that is inherently better for tracking references, for example, but is also inherently worse with regard to communication between people.

I would like to see Twitter implement the RE microsyntax (see A Useful Bit Of Microsyntax: RE), as part of the RT overhaul. A RE — as implemented currently in Tweetdeck — is like a RT, but doesn’t copy the text of the message. Instead, it has a pointer to the original message (in Tweetdeck this is encoded as a short URL), and then the remaining characters are available for making a comment:

RE http://bit.ly/892d6 I disagree with @gregarious about daylight savings time

Of course, within Twitter, the URL would not have to be exposed and could be part of an internal implementation. But the idea of a RE could be paired with the new retweet as a second tweet, associated with the retweeted message, and then displayed as a pair, like this:

gregarious I really like when the clocks change

about 2 hours ago from Twitter

Retweeted by you

      stoweboyd: I disagree with @gregarious about daylight savings time

Perhaps more interesting would be if a number of other folks retweeted @gregarious’ post as well:

gregarious I really like when the clocks change

about 2 hours ago from Twitter

Retweeted by 3

    stoweboyd: I disagree with @gregarious about daylight savings time

    themaria: he sleeps all day anyway

    brianthatcher: I never come out in the light of day

I don’t hold out much hope that Twitter will be stop, and to take ideas like these and incorporate into the current plans for retweet. They have gone a long way down a cul de sac, I fear, that will in the long run decrease the richness of our interactions on Twitter. Perhaps the howling from the user community when this is rolled out will get them to reconsider it.

My prediction is that people will revert to manually copying and pasting messages when they want to do something more than just a blind retweet. So we will have two contending sorts of RTs — classic RT v new RT — until the Twitter folks get around to implementing something like RE.

11 November 2009 Permalink

Project Retweet: When Ultrastructure Becomes Infrastructure

The Twitter retweet convention — where a user copies the text of another’s tweet, prefixes an ‘RT @another’ on the front, and then posts this amended copy — has become commonplace, widely supported by Twitter clients as a single mouseclick. However, Twitter has resisted making this convention part of the Twitter platform as a core primitive.

Note that ‘@username’ was at one time a convention, used to draw a specific user’s attention to a tweet, but the Twitter folks quickly saw the utility of that as a means of communication, so they rapidly incorporated that into the platform’s design. And retweets are becoming a metric used to determine the relative influence of twitterers, along with follower count, more or less playing the role that links play in the blogosphere.

Now, they have decided it is time for the microsyntactic convention of ‘RT’ to join ‘@’ in the infrastructure:

Project Retweet: Phase One - Biz Stone

Some of Twitter’s best features are emergent: people inventing simple but creative ways to share, discover, and communicate. One such convention is retweeting. When you want to call more attention to a particular tweet, you copy/paste it as your own, reference the original author with an @mention, and finally, indicate that it’s a retweet. The process works although it’s a bit cumbersome and not everyone knows about it.

Retweeting is a great example of Twitter teaching us what it wants to be. The open exchange of information can have a positive global impact and the more efficient dissemination of information across the entire Twitter ecosystem is something we very much want to support. That’s why we’re planning to formalize retweeting by officially adding it to our platform and Twitter.com.

Biz goes on to state that they will begin tooling an API with RT capabilities included, so that developers of Twitter applications can start to think about integration with this new capability.

Most important, Biz spells out how the user experience is supposed to work, and clarifying that RT will continue to work much as it has in the past. In other words, if you are following me and I retweet something from my friend @gregarious then you would see the retweet even if you aren’t following @gregarious yourself.

Why is this important? Because it supports the convention as it has emerged. It would be easy for Twitter to coopt the convention and make it work in a different fashion. In particular, they could have adopted the same model of visibility that they implemented in their last reworking of ‘@’ replies (or mentions), which is widely referred to as #fixreplies. In that case, the Twitter team decided that the way that ‘@’ had been working was annoying. In the older approach, if you were following me and I replied to my friend @gregarious then you would see the comment I made to him even if you weren’t following him. They changed these semantics so that you would only see the comment to @gregarious if you were following him too.

The logic of this is that some part of the Twitter community expressed the view that this was creating a noisy and confusing stream, because a lot of tweets would be directed to people they weren’t following, so they would only see half of these conversations.

Others — me included — suggested that the convention had emerged in the way that it had, organically, and it has many interesting properties, not the least of which is that users would see part of a conversation and then might visit the other half’s Twitter page to see the rest, and then perhaps start following that other person. When the half conversations are taken away, you might never know that the other half was there at all.
Twitter might have made this some sort of opt-in or opt-out feature, but they argued they could not think of a way to do so efficiently. They have waffled, suggesting they might revisit this in the future, but it is all very opaque.

It’s worth commenting that various counter-conventions have emerged to circumvent the restricted semantics of “@’, which is why you see ‘.@’ used widely now. Twitter does not recognize this as a @reply, so if I post ‘.@gregarious wake up!’ all my followers get to see it, and know that @gregarious has overslept.

However, retweets won’t look the same: the ‘RT’ and the ‘@username’ will not appear in the text portion of the retweet. These will become metadata, displayed in some other fashion. On one hand, this helps a great deal with the text squish problem, where adding ‘RT @gregarious’ at the front of a message may lead to the original message no longer fitting. On the other, though, the retweets might not stand out as they do presently. Designers of Twitter clients will simply have this as another design challenge, and I am sure that they will rise to the occasion.

And the last, and most serious issue in this reimplementation of retweets: the comments that people put on retweets won’t be supported. This is a serious shift away from the everyday convention:

RT @gregarious My head is killing me. | Yeah, take an aspirin.

where the text after the ‘|’ is a comment left by me. Other ways of offsetting comments are in use, like ‘<—’, ‘«’, and so on.

Twitter’s aim is architectural in an obvious way: they want to simply point at the original tweet from every retweet instead of creating 5000 slightly mangled copies.
But they are going to have to extend their implementation to allow users to leave an (optional) comment. Perhaps a second 140 character tweet twinned with the retweet? The outcome of this would be interesting since the comments added to the original tweet could be aggregated, like the chat in Friendfeed, although participation in the chat would still be distributed.

At any rate, this is the rub: if Twitter takes away our ability to comment on the retweets, people will start running around outside the implementation to get back the capabilities that have been taken away.

When the company behind a platform decides to take a user convention, like ‘RT’ and implement it as part of the infrastructure it is pulled from the ultrastucture, where the users live and invent. If the implementation doesn’t fit the contours of use that have become convention then there is a misfit. This misfit could be a gap, where less than the convention has been implemented. And a gap like that leads to a thunderclap, just like the vacuum caused by a lightning bolt creates a vacuum in the sky, and the surrounding air moves in to fill it.

I am hoping that the feedback from the community and the client developers will lead them toward a solution to the retweet comment problem before it actually surfaces. Biz stated that this would be phase one of Project Retweet, but I hope they aren’t planning to defer the comment issue to phase two.

[Other analysis: Jennifer Van Grove does a good job laying out a wish list for various sorts of filtered timelines based on a systemic RT, as well as the downsides of the new RT.]

14 August 2009 1 Permalink

A Useful Bit Of Microsyntax: RE

The new release of Tweedeck was released yesterday, and Iain Dodsworth and crew implemented (along with a long list of other new features and improvements) a small bit of microsyntax that he and I discussed a month or so ago: RE.

RE is based on the everyday notion of a RE — ‘in reference to’, or ‘with regard to’ — that business folks have used for decades in memos and email.
In the Twitter context, RE is similar to and complements RT. RT, as we all know, makes a copy of a tweet, and creates a ‘@username’ reference to the author of the original tweet, and prepends a ‘RT’ indicator at the start. RE, on the other hand, creates a URL that points to the original tweet, and does not copy any of the original tweet, and prepends ‘RE’ at the start.

The idea is that the user creates a RE with the intention of commenting on whatever the original tweet contained. Imagine that my pal @gregarious has tweeted something like this:

I think Jeff Pulver’s #140conf sounds great. Wish I were there.

and I might RE in this way

RE http://bit.ly @gregarious is one of many who wishes they could have attended the #140conf this week

17 June 2009 Permalink

Location, Location, Location: More on /Location and Microsyntax

It has been an interesting few days, since I posted A Modest Proposal For More Microstructure: Twitter /Locations, in which I presented the idea of a new sort of syntax for Twitter (or microsyntax) to represent location. Instead of tweeting this

Just landed at SFO headed downtown ASAP

tweeple could instead post this

Just landed at /SFO headed downtown ASAP

The idea being to have a human- and machine-readable to indicate location. Longer locations involving multiple words would be set off with trailing ‘/’ as well:

Working at /156 South Park, San Francisco CA/ this morning

This proposal has led to a great deal of feedback, ranging from ‘Cool, let’s build an app to try this out’ to ‘You’ve gotta be kidding’ and everything in between.

Perhaps the most organized arguments against the ‘geoslash’ idea (as Ross Mayfield and the WhereCamp folks are now calling it) are those offered by Ralf Rottman, whose post is entitled No additional Twitter meta tags, please!, which gives you a pretty good feel for his position on the subject.

Rottman uses the term ‘meta tag’ to represent what I am calling microsyntax (formerly I called it microstructure, but that is a bit less specific). Meta tags in HTML are various sorts of information buried in specific HTML elements, and these are intended to be machine readable, and not generally to be inspected by people. My goal with /location is to insert a small bit of punctuation in the tweet, which is human readable as well as machine readable.

His primary argument against microsyntax is clutter, which, he says, is already causing readability issues with usernames, shortened URLs and hashtags that are already in wide use. My answer to that is that people are trying to make Twitter workable, and these conventions have arisen to serve a need. Despite what the Sunday supplements are saying, most Twitter messages are not ‘just ate a pickle’, but are more likely to be something like ‘@ross Check this out, and get back to me http://bit.ly/vv1zC #passwords’. People are getting things done, not contemplating their navels, and if that means slightly greater complexity and lumpiness in the twitter stream, so be it.

The rest of his argument is really a tirade against the Twitter architecture. He wants metadata pulled out of the text of Twitter messages and supported in an invisible exterior way by a new Twitter plumbing:

But there is another not so philosophical reason why we should not go further with any of these suggestions: Fundamentally hashtags, @usernames and Stowe’s newly suggested location tags are merely workarounds for limitations of Twitter’s API.

Twitter essentially provides a real-time messaging infrastructure. Not more and not less. Twitter’s attempts to provide additional added value beyond being a free large-scale message pipe have yet to prove successful. The IT folks at Twitter already seem to experience severe technical challenges when it comes to implementing higher value features like conversational tooling and openly admit that it’s getting more and more difficult to address these advanced needs given the large scale user base Twitter has grown to.

Concepts like location, language, keywords and identity are obvious candidates when thinking about messaging and communication in general. It is somewhat astonishing that the Twitter API does not yet provide any good means for third parties to leverage these aspects. Instead we have to use hashtags to mark keywords, might use slashes to tag location and maybe sooner or later somebody will suggest using curly braces to mark products and brands.

As Steve Jobs uses to say: There must be a better solution.

One alternative could be to wait for the folks at Twitter to enhance their API. Developers of Twitter clients could then access a tweet’s meta properties like language, keywords, location, brand and other structured information simply by parsing the JSON or XML returned by calls to Twitter’s REST interfaces. For various reasons I’d not put my money into this one. As Twitter Co-founder Biz Stone stated earlier this week, one way of turning Twitter into a profitable business could be to provide richer tooling.

Combine this with the fact that it will never be in Twitter’s best interest to become a truly open social platform (”open” as described here by Chris Messina) I would rather expext them to make it even more difficult for third parties to easily enhance Twitter based services. Their stupid 100 requests per hour limit is a clear expression of how they plan to keep in charge (though they might continue to claim that technical scalability reasons force them to keep it up).

I suggest that Ralf take these recommendation up with the nice folks at Twitter. In the mean time, bitheads like me will continue to offer up ways to encode intention or meaning into the twitter stream, for any number of reasons. In the case of /location, my goal was simply to make it easy for a relatively dumb Twitter appliance to keep track of users” locations over time, based on the Twitter that exists today.

Other feedback:

• Many asked about the use of ‘/’ and argued for other characters — ‘/’ is an interesting sort of punctuation mark. It is not used in a wide variety of forms likely to be common in Twitter. It is found in URLs, but not as the leading character. It is used in alternatives, like ‘contact me by email/dm’ but again, not as a leading character, in general. It is easily reached on cell phones and other mobile devices because it is needed for URLs. I therefore think it is preferable to parentheses, colons, asterisks, and other suggestions made. In particular, ‘^’ is already in use as a convention for identity — initials of authors in group or corporate Twitter accounts.
• Lat Long — I think lat long is interesting for machines, but I can’t parse it so it’s not in the same category.
• URL — Some have suggested use of a URL like http://sent.fm/san+franciso, which translates to a page at that service, but I am opposed for three reasons. First, I don’t like the idea that some service gets all the links (same argument I had years ago about Technorati and tags, when I argued for Open Tags). Second, the URL takes up a lot more characters than two slashes does. Third, it doesn’t read like everyday speech.
• People have asked about ‘l:’ and other proposed conventions — I don’t like ‘l:’ because it interrupts my scanning of language more than ‘/’ does. I don’t like the notion of taking over alphabetic letters to perform punctuation duties. That’s one of the reasons I dislike ‘RT’. Besides, ‘l:’ has been around and hasn’t caught on: time for another experiment.
• Some have suggested that smart apps should just read everything, scanning for location information. First, that could be very computationally intensive, and second, not all discussions about location mean that the author is asserting actually being there.

  I wish I were in Paris

  is different from

  Just pulled into the train station in /Paris, France/

  It is the latter case that I am interested in. Also, something like this

  Just read that the #WhiteHouse is against sunflower seeds

  is very different from

  Taking the tour of the /White House, Washington DC/. Hope to meet Barack!

Ross Mayfield and some folks at the WhereCamp this last weekend are working on an app to parse /location from tweets. More to follow on that front. I know there are other developments going on in that direction, too.

26 May 2009 Permalink

A Modest Proposal For More Microstructure: Twitter /Locations

[Update 14 December 2009: I have adopted Ross Mayfield’s term ‘geoslash’ in place of ‘location tags’. See Geoslash at Microsyntax.org’s wiki for a fuller explanation.]

Hashtags (Twitter tags) were proposed by Chris Messina, and in use by Chris, me, and others before tools existed to do much with them, aside from search. In similar fashion, I am proposing a new sort of microstructure, just a little bit ahead of tools to support it.

The idea is similar to tags: use a distinctive character to set off some microstructured metadata, although in this case, the metadata is location, and the character is ‘/’, the slash.

Imagine I posted this on Twitter [as I did yesterday]:

stoweboyd Just landed at /JFK

The intention is obvious: to indicate /location. And, of course, imagine that Twitter-smart applications can consume this stream of /locational cues and do interesting things with them. I am involved in the development of one such application, but certainly anyone can exploit this information, if and when the Twittosphere wants to start microstructuring this way.

I also looked and ‘/’ is easily accessible on cell phones, which is an important issue, considering the ‘just arrived in an airport’ or ‘hanging out in a bar’ use cases.

Unlike Messina’s tags, I am proposing that multiword locations be indicated with a closing slash, like this, that I posted yesterday:

stoweboyd hanging at /Starbucks, 93 Greenwich Ave, NYC/

This way we can avoid all the problems with one word indicators. (I wish we could have avoided this with Messina’s tags, too, as I wrote way back when.)

There are other aspects of /locations that I am working on with my partners, about which more to follow. My first hope is to get a basic convention out there, and existing search mechanisms can be tweaked to do the right thing with the format of /locations.

A last note: some people have used tags as stand-in for /locations, but I think that is wrong. Tags are better thought of as concepts, while location is very tangible. More importantly, the use cases — while they may have some overlap — are very different.

For example, If I see a tweet with /White House, Washington DC/ that means the place, and not the conceptual overtones of #WhiteHouse, which probably is part of a political discussion. The same holds with /French Laundry, Napa CA/ (the place) and #FrenchLaundry (the cuisine or experience), or /Evian (the place) and #Evian (the water).

So, I invite everyone to start localizing with /locations. I promise you a Twitter appliance to make sense of them is on the way.

21 May 2009 Permalink