Twitter Micro Markup Spec
by Tim Wolters April 25, 2008
Just like the semantic web I think Twitter would benefit tremendously from introducing a micro markup language that monitoring tools could use to pick up data more accurately. It’s a fairly hard problem to parse blogs and tag them with semantic and qualitative data. Now think about shrinking that text down to 140 characters and you really don’t have a hell of a lot to work with. If we introduce an abbreviated name-value system inside our tweets we can convey a ton of rich information that will be easier to get the message across to the companies and services that anger and overjoy us, events we’re attending, observations we make, etc. It’s time to take the next step with Twitter.
I think it would be simplest to put an abbreviated 2 letter type code at the start of the message with a sentiment symbol next (+ = good, – = bad, / = neutral), and the subject that you will be talking about. For instance I just got back from a trip to Minneapolis. My flight was delayed again (probably my fourth flight in a row on United that was delayed).
I twittered the following: “RV-UAL another trip, another flight delay on United”. In the first 6 characters I know that this is a review of United Airlines and it is negative. Simple, brief, easy for both humans and machines to parse and interpret.
The codes I’m thinking of are:
OB = observation
EV = Event
RV = Review
If it’s an event, perhaps the standard could be to create the event in facebook and snurl it for the event subject. what are some others? Let me know what you think!
