Everything is Miscellaneous | Twitter metadata and where standards come from.
Matthew Ingram at Gigagomblogs about an upcoming Twitter feature called Twitter Annotations. Well, it’s not actually a feature. It’s the ability to attach metadata to a tweet. This is potentially great news, since it will give us a way to add context to tweets and to enable machine-processing of tweets, not to mention that URLs could be sent as metadata rather than as subtractions from the 140-character limit. This is yet another example of information scaling to the point where we have to introduce more information to manage it. How about one of those bogus “laws” people seem to like (well, I know I do): Information sufficiently scaled creates a need for more information.
Twitter is specifying the way in which Annotations will be encoded, but not what the metadata types will be. You can declare a “type” with its own set of “attributes.” What types? Whatever you (or, more exactly, developers and hackers) find useful. Matthew cites a number of folks who are basically positive but who express a variety of worries, including Google open advocate Chris Messina who warns that there could be a mare’s nest of standards, that is, values for types and attributes.Dave Winer takes Google to task for slagging off on Twitter for this.
Continues @http://www.everythingismiscellaneous.com/2010/06/20/twitter-metadata-and-where-standards-come-from/
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- Twitter Annotations Are Coming – What Do They Mean For Twitter and the Web? (gigaom.com)
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- Twitter To Open “Annotations” Metadata To All Developers (socialtimes.com)
