

Viral, Open, and Consumable - Twitter Annotations and the Social API - thedob
http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/viral-open-and-consumable-twitter-annotations

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marknutter
This has all sorts of implications. For starters, if tweetmeme and the major
Twitter clients out there adopted a standard of providing the link as an
annotatioon, it would basically destroy the url shortening market in one fell
swoop

Another potentially awesome use case involves retweets. Twitter's new retweet
system was controversial when it was rolled out because it removed the ability
for people to input their own comments on a link they wanted to rewet. The
truth is, though, that there was usually a pretty limited space for these
comments in the first place. Now, annotations could be used as the main
conduit for comments about a particular link. A global, Twitter-wide
commenting system could be established if everybody agreed to a standard.

Providing more details about the users posting the tweets would also be quite
useful. Imagine if you see an interesting tweet from someone, and embedded in
that tweet is also their entire social networking presence and perhaps an
extended biography.

The possibilities seem limitless, but as the article mentions there are
potential drawbacks. For one, it may take a while to get the big players to
agree on standards. Also, the elegance and power of Twitter was the 140
character limit. What happens when a bunch of other garbage starts getting
attached to these previously svelte tweets.

Whatever happens it is sure to be interesting, though.

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thedob
All great use cases. In the case of a global commenting system, I think that
rather than "everybody agreeing on one standard," there's an opportunity for
one major player to define the standard simply by announcing support for a
specific format, and implementing it into their product. Disqus would be a
good candidate.

Anyone who wanted their tweets picked up by the hypothetical Disqus engine
would need to annotate accordingly, third parties would build apps to support
this annotation, and the cycle would perpetuate with everyone conforming to
said standard.

~~~
marknutter
Heres hoping

