Hashtags emerged some time ago as a way for people to indicate keywords in their tweets, metadata if you like. Usage was simple, just put a # before any word and it became a #hashtag. Search engines could filter through the noise for # and find metadata about the tweets. This works well for custom words that you want to create on the fly, but what strikes me is there is an opportunity for sets of letters or codes that have meaning in of themselves without the need for that additional character of the hash tag.
Chris Messina has proposed something called Microsyntax that uses what he is dubbing slashtags that use a slash to define the metadata ie.
- /cc -carbon copy
- /by -authored by
- /via -found via
I think this is a great idea, but for such well defined letter codes is the / necessary? I also wonder if we define such tags and start building tools around them (Tweetie 2 supports slashtags) we actually limiting ourselves or blinkering ourselves from emerging communication norms that are being defined by the broader user base of twitter.
Wouldn’t it be possible with such a limited set of codes to just use the letter codes themselves as a way to find this additional metadata or conversation analysis? This would have the advantage of using the norms that are already emerging. I see people using the code “via” quite a lot, so a search of twitter for ” via @…” (notice the space before via and between the @) would garner excellent results without having to persuade everyone to use a new code.
I think the slashcode works well if you are trying to create new norms, but if people are already using cc, via, and re it would be as well to start building tools that take advantage of those norms because as people start getting value out of using those norms, more people will start using them, and therefor the tools become more useful. 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. This should involve picking up things like the slashtags, but also searching for the other patterns that are emerging.
Quick Plug:
We are starting to work on some of these conversation analysis problems at Traackr.com to help provide a richer view of the the community ecosystems that we are discovering for clients. If you’re doing any community outreach work we’d love to talk to you 
UPDATE: @stoweboyd has also written about the Microsyntax proposal here suggesting some other ideas and norms that can be used. I think the upshot is that there are many ways that users are learning to communicate on twitter and we need to listen carefully to the norms that are emerging as I don’t think a grand unified theory is practical.
UPDATE2: @chrismessina has written a clarifying post on his blog which explains something that I had not previously understood and that is his idea of chaining the slashtags after the first / as he said just trying separate the “meta from the meat” (which is itself a wonderful phrase).
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Karl,
You’re using ‘\’ where Chris used ‘/’, first of all. Secondly, as I said here — http://bit.ly/Hiky1 — I don’t think we should advance any more microsyntax based on English words, in general. Also, I personally favor ‘-@’ instead of ‘/via @’ because it saves a lot of characters.
Thanks for your post Karl.
A couple things:
* Stowe Boyd deserves credit for Microsyntax. I just pitched in in the beginning and document ideas on the wiki. I didn’t start the project.
* Slashtags use a forward slash (“/”) — rather than a backslash — as you have in your examples.
So, a response:
The concept of the slashtag was really just me 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 take a look at what people were doing, or what conventions already existed, which is a point that you 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.”
When I originally proposed hashtags, they imitated IRC, Jaiku, Delicious, and Flickr:
http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2007/08/25/groups-for-twitter-or-a-proposal-for-twitter-tag-channels/
In that way, they were *derived and codified* rather than invented.
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 doesn’t need its own slash, and you can daisy-chain them together:
/cc @username1 via @username2
The slash 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!”.
Lastly, even though it may not appear this way at first, all these formats that I’ve proposed are really intended for people first, and machines second. 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 make communication over a constrained channel clearer and more effective. Just like typical typographic markup makes prose more readable, slashtags and hashtags are designed to make communicating over Twitter better reflect the intentional message of the author.
PS People interested in microsyntax — ‘deep structure of the real time stream — might look at microsyntax.org, a non-profit I set up. We have a wiki capturing a long list of proposals and observations of microsyntax in the wild.
thanks so much guys for the clarification and other resources. I swear a blog post is generally the quickest way for me to find out how little I know about a topic
No problem. If you were confused or had questions, you probably weren’t alone! Thanks for prompting me to write up some thoughts that’ve been on my mind lately!
And, I’ll fix my spelling of your name… oops!
Just like typical typographic markup makes prose more readable, slashtags and hashtags are designed to make communicating over Twitter better reflect the intentional message of the author.
Just like typical typographic markup makes prose more readable, slashtags and hashtags are designed to make communicating over Twitter better reflect the intentional message of the author.