FactoryCity

Prompted by a post by Karl Long and Aral Balkan’s new Twitterformats initiative, I wanted to clarify a few about hashtags and slashtags — at least as I see them.

First: Stowe Boyd deserves credit for Microsyntax. I just pitched in in the beginning and use the wiki to document some ideas I’ve had. I didn’t start the project, though I do think it’s a useful convening spot.

As well, Stowe and I have different ideas about microsyntax, and it’s worth taking the time to grok his perspective.

Second: when I wrote my post on what are now called slashtags, I was just documenting what I was doing… not necessarily intending to tell other people what to do. Hey, if people copied me, I figured, they might as well “get” what I was up to. Hence my blog post.

As with hashtags, I just started using them and didn’t wait for anyone to agree with me! Now, I did look at what people were doing, or what conventions already existed, which is a point that Karl made:

My suggestion to anyone looking to build tools that tease out meaning from the conversation that is happening on twitter should look carefully at the communication and social norms that are emerging and leverage that.

And that Aral also makes:

There is no centralized authority that approves Twitterformat proposals – Twitterformats are contributed and implemented by the community and they live or die based on whether Twitter client developers adopt them or not.

When I originally proposed hashtags, they imitated IRC, Jaiku, Delicious, and Flickr. In that way, they were derived and codified rather than invented — though I suppose they were somewhat novel, as no one had really been thinking about “Twitter Typography” in 2007.

As with slashtags, the whole point is to make a tweet more readable — or, as I like to say, to “separate the meta from the meat“. Each slashtag, thus, doesn’t need its own slash, and you can daisy-chain them together:

[tweet content] /cc @username1 via @username2

The slash, therefore, is a way of saying: “hey, here’s some meta data for this post — you can ignore it if you want — the good stuff is to the left!”.

So, even though it may not seem like it at first, all these formats that I’ve proposed and use are really intended for people first, and machines second (something I learned from microformats). I don’t think that people will use them if they’re not fairly easy to use, remember, and aren’t more convenient than what they’re doing already. And by “convenient”, I mean that they make it easy to communicate over a constrained channel clearer and more effectively than not using them.

Just as typographic markup (i.e. punctuation like periods, exclamation points, commas, semi-colons) makes prose more readable, slashtags and hashtags are designed to make communicating over Twitter better and more efficiently reflect the intentional message of the author. If the format succeeds at enhancing expression, then they will be adopted; if not, they will likely wither on the vine.

Perhaps it’s useful to remember that my background is in communication design and typography, rather than format or data design. If you think about from that perspective, hashtags and slashtags will probably make a lot more sense!