Stay N' Alive - Latest Comments in Farewell to the ‘@’ - We Welcome the Meta Revolution

Re: Farewell to the ‘@’ - We Welcome the Meta Revolution

jessestay — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 21:42:22 -0000

I view SMS as just another UI. With a proper meta backend, Twitter could
simply interpret the SMS text, parse out the @'s and the #'s and insert them
into the appropriate meta tag. This way focus could remain on the content,
and 140 characters wouldn't be affected by the person in the Tweet or what
the Tweet is being tagged with.

Re: Farewell to the ‘@’ - We Welcome the Meta Revolution

mclaughj — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 21:37:39 -0000

I have been with you on not including meta information in the 140 character limit since the very beginning and I think the points you make in this post are valid and very applicable.

If I could 'spend' my entire 140 characters on a comment I had on a blog post, and then include the "reading:http://url.com" meta tag for example, I think it would be much more powerful.

But, as you mentioned on Twitter, it's not likely that Twitter will implement anything like this soon.

Re: Farewell to the ‘@’ - We Welcome the Meta Revolution

Stephen Paul Weber — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 10:44:06 -0000

I don't think this in broken - but by design. If you want to be sure someone gets a message (and you don't know their reading habits) txt/dm them or something. @ is good for unambiguous mentions of names, and easy replying (which can be invisibly turned into data, but typing the @ is still a nice UI)

Re: Farewell to the ‘@’ - We Welcome the Meta Revolution

jessestay — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 09:53:22 -0000

I recognize that, and I know SMS is a protocol - it's a great protocol
in fact that has some great uses. However, at the end of every SMS
request (on the server) is a client that can parse SMS requests. Just
as I mention it could easily parse out all @addresses and #hashtags,
and leave the body of the message so only pure content is left and the
remainder is sent as meta information back to the microblog service.
SMS should be treated like any other client, just as XMPP would be
treated as well.

Re: Farewell to the ‘@’ - We Welcome the Meta Revolution

Marjolein Katsma — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 03:37:22 -0000

SMS is a protocol - there's no such thing as an "SMS client" that could do something like "parsing". all there is is a field to enter a message in and a way to send it on its way.

All semantics needs to be inside that message - and remain there. And the same applies to any context where a message can be posted that is not a "microblogging client".

Re: Farewell to the ‘@’ - We Welcome the Meta Revolution

jessestay — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 03:36:08 -0000

You and I will simply have to agree to disagree on this one. I've
stated my points.

Re: Farewell to the ‘@’ - We Welcome the Meta Revolution

Marjolein Katsma — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 03:31:02 -0000

So sorry to find you still don't get it, Jesse.

Twitter and identi.ca are not broken at all for embracing a useful convention: a @ to directly address a person (multiple ones in a single message) is not "clutter" at all, it's useful markup that allows any reader of a message to see at a glance who a message is addressed to - in any medium the message is rendered. Even if their interface doesn't support linking, the addressing remains clearly visible by means of this markup.

That's not broken; that's useful and very powerful. Auto-linking enhances that, but remember not all contexts where a message may be read may support linking: the @ stands on its own as useful markup for the reader, including all readers who are not addressees. Replacing @ by tagging addressees loses this advantage because it doesn't "travel" with the message itself and is application-dependent. At the poster's end, having the addressing part separated from the message makes it much harder to quickly fire off a message to one or more poeple - nothing beats to type one a few phrases and hit Enter.

No matter what "micro blogging clients" may be able to do - don't forget that not everyone uses a microblogging client. For instance, a Jabber client is not that - all it does is transport the *messages*. Same for SMS. And how on earth woudl I use SMS or Jabber to "tag" addresses? All I have is a field to enter a *message*, and a button or Enter to send it on its way.

The basic semantics needs to be in the message itself, not outside it - and addressees are very much part of the basic semantics. For this reason, tagging also doesn't fix the ambiguity problem that is /created/ by doing away with @ to directly address someone - @ already does that perfectly and no workaround does it as well as the original and widely-used markup convention (widely-used outside microblogging for years already, don't forget that - it was simply adopted, for a good reason).

I'm on the fence about hashtags though they are useful inside a message; if a message is about something already, just mention that and the meta layer won't be missed all that much in contexts that don't support this layer and have only the message content.

But giving up on @ is simply very, very shortsighted: it breaks what is not broken in the first place. You need to think wider than "microblogging client" - there are way more contexts in which our messages are created and more contexts even in which they appear (don't forget search engines!); and for some of us our major UI is not a microblogging client at all.

Re: Farewell to the ‘@’ - We Welcome the Meta Revolution

jessestay — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 00:32:07 -0000

Steve,

I covered that in the second to last paragraph. SMS just needs to be
treated as another client, just like XMPP. The hashtags and intended
recipients shouldn't be parsed as part of the original message, and
the SMS client should parse those out and apply them as meta
information via the API.

Re: Farewell to the ‘@’ - We Welcome the Meta Revolution

steveivy — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 00:14:19 -0000

Hi Jesse,

One thing you don't touch on is that @replies and #hashtags are still useful to the SMS user. A lot of Twitter's popularity early on was due to the clever integration of SMS. Any time we start talking about adding meta, non-textual content and context to microblogging, we lose the (broken, but still terribly useful) SMS integration.