This past weekend, Twitter engineer Raffi Krikorian unveiled a preliminary view of Twitter’s upcoming annotations, aka “twannotations,” at WarbleCamp, a two-day unconference for Twitter developers. The ability to annotate tweets is something that Krikorian feels could be “a game-changer on the platform.”
Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch writes:
Annotations will allow developers to ‘add any arbitrary metadata to any tweet.’ For instance, today a Tweet can be tagged by the application that created it, the location it was sent from, and who it is replying to. All of this metadata allows Tweets to be sorted and filtered in interesting ways. Rather than wait for Twitter to officially launch a new type of annotation, Twitter is opening that up to developers who can come up with their own.
Other things we know so far about Twitter annotations include:
- Annotations will increase search and streaming ability.
- Annotations will have the same visibility setting as their corresponding tweets.
- Annotations will extend the idea behind @replies so that it applies to generic entities.
- Twitter will also publish usage, adoption, and trending stats.
- Twitter will not validate annotations.
- Twitter will provide a “best practices” document upon launch.
The new feature should launch in the next couple of months. You can view Krikorian’s WarbleCamp slideshow in its entirety below.
Source: “An Early Look At Twitter Annotations Or, ‘Twannotations’,” TechCrunch, 05/08/10
Source: “Extremely preliminary look at Twitter’s Annotations,” mehack, 05/08/10
Source: “Twitter’s Gift To Developers: Limitless User Streams And Annotations,” TechCrunch, 04/14/10
Screen capture of Raffi Krikorian’s slideshow used under Fair Use: Reporting.
