Microsyntax.org

• "Groups for Twitter; or A Proposal for Twitter Tag Channels", Chris Messina, August 2007
• "Hash Tags = Twitter Groupings", Stowe Boyd, August 2007

• Suggested Method of Publishing Microformats in Twitter Posts Andy Mabbett January 2008

• Triple tags on Twitter Andy Mabbett July 2008

• Twitter, Semiotics and Programmatics, and Running out of Characters, Adam Rothstein, June 2009.

• Triple-tag references to Twitter posts Andy Mabbett May 2009



[excerpted from 2009 Wiki; a future project would be to break up the various elements of this into updated, indepent posts.]

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I write a response to a proposed approach to what I think is a non-problem.

Chris Messina tries to clarify what he is doing with slashtags, and introduces ‘twitter typographics’ as a synonym for microsyntax.

Claire Cain Miller profiles the rise of microsyntax in Twitter without using the term and completely skirting the retweet controversy.

I saw this post from @valdiskrebs go by today:

RT <@stoweboyd no, @jeffjarvis I disagree, Jeff. Putting someone on a list is an *implicit recommendation* if public. #lists/> absolutely!

Note that this came through Twitter and my Echofon client fine, so they weren’t confused by HTMLish characters.

This is a general approach to offsetting comments, since I could append my own comment, embedding @valdiskrebs in brackets. This approach requires more characters than my use of ‘|’ to offset training comments, but perhaps is a bit more clear.

I worry that the average joe might not get it. And why not just ‘(’ and ‘)’?

I think this is way way overkill compared to my suggestions about ‘…’:



in 140 characters: Vantage Credit Union recently launched something I have not seem before, they allow customers to check their balances and transfer funds between account through Twitter.

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“Text is a UI

It’s a common mistake to think that only full-fledged graphical user interfaces count as interaction design and deserve usability attention.”

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At the end of a serious discussion of honing a tweet through five rounds of redesign, Jacob Nielsen comes out with a great rationale for Microsyntax.

Text is a UI.

So we are justified in taking the time to discuss alternatives, to test usability with actual people, to redesign.

This suggest a new additional need for various alternatives for microsyntax, which is to get people uninvolved with the discussions to use the alternatives: to expose them to a ‘/’ or a ‘>’ for location tags, for example, and see which work best.

I will do some thinking about this over the next few days, and see if we can’t use a survey tool, or build an app for this purpose.



I had a long email interchange with Mike Robinson, the CTO of Twitextendr, regarding their ‘category’ tags. Since Twitextender will be plopping things into the Twitter stream, he wanted to ask about their use of ‘!’ as a category tag.

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I noted the recent announcement from Mobypicture.com's head, Mathys van Abbe, about using hashtags to route materials to specific external services

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