Comments on: New microsyntax for Twitter: three pointers and the slasher

By: The Short and Illustrious History of Twitter #Hashtags

The Short and Illustrious History of Twitter #Hashtags — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 02:33:15 +0000

[...] types of metadata markers, for instance /via, /cc and /by. Those have been christened “slashtags,” but they haven’t caught on quite as [...]

By: Barton Smith

Barton Smith — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 12:23:17 +0000

Ha I acutally spent some time trying to standardise my twitter pointers; figuring out brackets, colons, location. This is great though and is very similar to what I use on my blog. Will begin using from now on. Let’s hope it catches on. Shame is, most people don’t care though.

By: campsite | proposed twitter microsyntax: by chris messina

campsite | proposed twitter microsyntax: by chris messina — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 15:11:10 +0000

[...] character usage and ways of crediting people on twitter. The extremely thorough post over at his blog is a must read for any twitter users and possibly for twitter haters as [...]

By: Dave

Dave — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 22:13:14 +0000

I haven’t come across /by before, I really like the idea though, I think I’ll start using that as it comes up.

By: Peter Zingg

Peter Zingg — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 16:04:50 +0000

Some problems I find with Twitter for iPhone: 1. Retweet just does what it says, not allowing you to add a comment. 2. “Quote” tweet puts the original poster’s @sig and the tweet inside quotation marks. Then I have to remove the quotation marks and usually put an RT in front of the @sig, and then add my own two cents at the end with a double slash (“//” – end of line comment syntax from many programming languages). So it ends up looking like this:

RT @nytimes: Big Problems in Afghanistan http://j.mp/55555 // You’re not kidding!

Do you think there would be a nicer syntax that would give credit to the original source and let me add my own words? “/me” doesn’t seem right to me.

By: New twitter micro syntax | blog | theideasketchpad®

New twitter micro syntax | blog | theideasketchpad® — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 03:00:34 +0000

[...] post by Chris Messina spelling out a new microsyntax for Twitter. (If you’re not into Twitter, this will make NO sense to [...]

By: Jay Bienvenu

Jay Bienvenu — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 02:57:25 +0000

Twitter has already announced plans to begin shortening links with their own domain. With this, each URL will count no more than 20 characters against the 140-character limit. Can’t find an article offhand but try http://twitter.com/#search?q=twitter%20short%20urls.

By: VonFernSeher

VonFernSeher — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 17:41:08 +0000

I think there are a dozen more important cuts to do on twitter than implementing a rather complicated reference system.

Long time since I’ve been pushing to make the links shorter. “http://” steals 7 (in words: seven!) characters, “www.” another 4.

I am very much in favor of combining the search advantages of hashtags with shortening URL.

## “http://” + automatically a hashtag
### “http://www.” + the same

By: Greg

Greg — Tue, 25 May 2010 17:43:54 +0000

The “cc” is highly useful. I don’t usually bother with the pointers, though, when context makes it obvious that I’m doing a CC:

Pork rinds are the food of the ungodly. /@person1 @person2

As for the question “why add noise”? I think there are 2 considerations:

1. You might be making a general tweet, which SHOULD be directed at your entire follower list, but which you want to bring to the attention of particular people who might otherwise not notice it. Nothing wrong with that…i t’s not “noise” any more than if the cc wasn’t there.

2. For shared public conversations (multiple people who are known to follow each other) there’s an appropriate way to deal with this: start the tweet with an @reply to at least one of those people:

@person1 will probably agree that pork rinds are the food of the ungodly. /cc @person2

Should substantially reduce the noise to your follower list as a whole, since they would have to be mutual followers.

By: David Ing

David Ing — Thu, 20 May 2010 16:01:56 +0000

@factoryjoe I like the idea of slashtags, and will start using them.

I want to find another way to prepend blog comments (since I twitterfeed Cocomments). Prepending the twitter handle works when the blogger is on Twitter. When he/she isn’t — or worse yet, when disambiguation is needed — I need an alternative. Maybe a hashtag is second-best.