Tag: implementation

Twitter Hashtags: A Quickie [en]

[fr] On commence à ajouter des tags aux messages Twitter. Comme la place est limitée, le tag est souvent incorporé au message. Attention donc à ne pas sortir les tags du message lors de l'implémentation de cette fonctionnalité dans vos outils.

Steven Hodson has questions about hashtags in Twitter (via Stowe). He also talks of possible support for these in TwitBox:

And yes I am asking this for some purely selfish reasons as I am thinking about adding experimental support for this idea to TwitBox so I would definitely be interested in some feedback on this.

Steven Hodson, A question for Twitter users out there

(For reference, hashtags is a proposal for Twitter tag channels by Chris Messina. It is still not the contact tagging I’ve been asking for — but I hear the Twitter boys are working on that.)

A quickie, that I’ve been thinking about: as space is limited in twitter messages, I’ve noticed a tendency to just insert a hash in the message in front of a relevant word, if the tag one wanted to use was already part of the message. Example:

Writing a message about using #hashtags on #twitter. #tagging

In this case, I saved space by using the hash inside my sentence, and not repeating the tags “hashtags” and “twitter” alongside “tagging”.

So one important thing would be to not remove the tag from the message when putting it in a channel. Otherwise we could end up with things like this in the channel #twitter:

Writing a message about using on. (tags: hashtags, twitter, tagging)

See how bad this would be?

Incorporating metadata in the message “body” itself is nothing really new (microformats!) but here there is an extra incentive to do it: space is limited. Keep that in mind when implementing hashtags for Twitter or other presence tools.

Update: Old, but still relevant. Some thoughts about tagging, tags, and tag combinations written in 2005, just after Technorati started indexing tags.

Twitter: We Love Our Partial Conversations [en]

[fr] Twitter cache maintenant les conversations partielles, ce que je trouve très dommage. C'était une porte ouverte pour découvrer des amis d'amis -- et en plus, l'implémentation actuelle nous prive d'une partie du vécu de nos amis, simplement parce qu'ils ne nous l'adressent pas.

I noticed this morning that Twitter is hiding messages addressed (using @username) to people one is not following. You can still see them by looking at a friend’s page, but they don’t appear on one’s home page anymore.

Example: on Faruk’s Twitter page, you can see many messages addressed to people I don’t follow, using the @username syntax.

Faruk's Twitter Stream

If I look at my homepage, now, only the messages which are not addressed to a recognized username I’m not following (follow me there?) are visible in my home page:

My Twitter "Friends" View

This twitter, for example, is invisible on my home page. I only get this unaddressed one.

This means that we do not see what is commonly called “partial conversations” — ie, conversations the people you are following are having with people that they are following but you are not. While some people will rejoice, because they found that annoying, I find that it’s a damn shame. And I’m not alone.

Why do I think it’s such a shame? Well, yes, twitter is mainly for keeping in touch with people you already know. But it’s also a really great place to get to know the friends of your friends — and partial conversations are the doorway to this. Partial conversations have drawn me to people I didn’t otherwise know on Twitter, because I’ve found them involved in conversations with a friend of mine, or even, a few friends of mine. Curiosity, went to check on them, ended up adding them.

With the current implementation, this would never have happened.

And even if you don’t think meeting knew people is interesting — there are many times when I have discovered that an existing friend of mine had finally got a Twitter account only because I caught a partial conversation between him and somebody else.

So, please, Twitter: give us back our partial conversations. Make it an option to hide them if some people really hate them. But don’t shut me out of what’s going on in my friends’ lives just because they happen to be addressing it to somebody I don’t (yet) know.

Update, July 25, 2007

Another reason why this is broken: I never saw this twitter, though it was addressed to me (too), because I don’t follow neilford.

Twitter / Faruk Ates: @neilford @stephtara thanks...