For instance, when one of my friends in Australia (I’m in Ireland myself) tweets that they’re about to start live video streaming some event they’re attending at 1pm, I need to first remember that they’re in the AEDT timezone then convert that to GMT. Alright for one friend once per day, but not for dozens numerous times per day. Horribly messy. So last century.

Now recall that the watch maker Swiss Swatch tried to solve this kind of problem a decade ago with “Swatch Internet Time” (SIT) and the idea of dividing the day into a thousand “beats”. The notation used to reference a SIT time is @. So @999, for instance, is the same time everywhere in the world.

When I first blogged about this today I made the mistake of saying that I’d like to revive SIT. It’s a mistake because a universal time reference shouldn’t be tied to a single commercial brand. So how about using hastags instead? Instead of tweeting “I’m about to do such and such @059″, how about tweeting “I’m about to do such and such at #059″.

Instead of calling it Swatch Internet Time we could just call it “hashtime”. Instead of saying “I’m going to do something at 270 beats”, why not say “I’m going to do something at hash270″.

I can imagine at least one huge benefit if this convention were widely adopted – we could build Twittervision like service for scanning what people are *intending* to do at certain times of the day. For instance, if I wanted to record a Skype conversation among four friends in different timezones at some time tonight, I could just propose a time of #0830 and my friends could easily see if that clashes with anything else on that hashtag (for their group of friends).

The advantage of stick with 1000 time divisions per day and the Swiss meridian is that you could, in order to bootstrap the efffort, use the downloads from the Swatch website for tracking ‘hashtime’

http://pigsonthewing.wordpress.com/2008/01/05/suggested-method-of-publishing-microformats-in-twitter-posts/